As times change, so do notions of what constitutes a green product for home improvement. Once upon a time, harvesting wood was considered unsustainable, but now the tide has turned. More and more, we look at carpet as the greater of two evils thanks to the dust and germs that can build up within its fibers.

While my personal preference for hardwood might have prevailed in the long-term, our decision to rip out our upstairs carpet right away was triggered by an asthma attack I endured during one of my first nights in our new house. We knew that we had to do something, and immediately began looking at a variety of alternatives for replacing the carpeted floor with sustainable hardwood.

Forest Stewardship Certification

initially, we looked at FSC certified wood as a possibility. For anybody unfamiliar with Forest Stewardship Certification, it is a label applied to wood sourced from sustainably managed forests. But because we understood that suppliers typically incur extra costs to apply for the certification, we were concerned that the premium charged for FSC wood can be prohibitive.

Salvaged Wood as an Alternative Green Product

A trip to the salvage store around the corner gave us another alternative. The owner of the store showed us his supply of heart pine, which he had pulled out of a turn-of-the-century mansion. Homes of our house’s vintage typically were built with oak in the main rooms and heart pine in the bedrooms (pine was a cheaper alternative then). Heart pine would have stayed true to the original aesthetic of the home, but interestingly would have cost us more today than oak because all the forests that originally supplied old growth heart pine have been decimated.

Problems with Salvaged Wood

while the price of the heart pine seemed reasonable to us (just under $6), we quickly encountered a glitch when we spoke with the floor installer. The installer examined the piece of floor board that the salvage store had supplied as a sample and explained that he would have to charge $200 more because it would need to be cleaned. Years of finish and dirt had built up along the tongue and grooves of the wood, and for the boards to fit together neatly, they would need to be scraped clean. This would be a labor-intensive process and one that the installer would be reticent to take on.

“Clean” Salvaged Wood

The floor installer referred us to another local business that specialized in salvage wood. This business typically goes into old industrial facilities, tears out beams, and runs them through a sawmill, producing a product that is high quality both due to the character of the wood (old industrial facilities are often built with old growth wood unlike anything that can be obtained these days) and due to the fact that running the wood through a sawmill produces boards with like-new tongue and grooves. While this quality lumber typically goes for much more than we were hoping to pay ($8-$14 per sf), the business happened to have some floor boards that had been cleaned by hand. While the lot of wood fell slightly short of what we needed, the lumber company was able to secure some new wood of similar dimensions that we were able to interweave with the old wood to make sure we had enough to cover the room.

Advice for Those Interested in Salvage

For those interested in installing salvaged wood, be warned. The result can be beautiful due to the incredible variation in colors found in old wood, but the work involved to install it can be rough on whoever takes on the task. In particular, ripped floor boards can be damaged in many ways (splintered, full of nail holes, rotted, etc), and require a greater buffer of installer waste than new wood. If you decide to use salvaged wood over other green products for flooring, be prepared to manage the process more than you’d need to otherwise!