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home all this lumber. I would stay up at night and de-nail it all and then I would have sales on the weekends. ON HIS DECISION TO OPEN IN TACOMA We've been up in Seattle for over 20 years, so we're pretty embedded there. I [thought about] Tacoma because there's nothing like it. Tacoma's got a great history. It's actually older than Seattle. I said, "I think Tacoma has the market and the surrounding area. I think there's a market. I think people will appreciate what we do down here, as they do up in Seattle." It is different [in Seattle than in Tacoma]. But I'm not sure [if it's] because we are so young down here. When the Seattle store started, it was very similar to what we are experiencing now in Tacoma. It was more 'function' as opposed to 'form.' When Earthwise started in Seattle 20 years ago, it was [about] function and people would come to the store because they needed cabinets or they needed a hot water heater or they needed a door. In Seattle, it used to be 100 percent function and a little bit of form. Now in the Seattle store, it's almost gone to the opposite of more form than function. So in the Tacoma area right now, it seems to be more function than form. The percentages are just different, but the clientele is the same. Everybody who comes in the store really enjoys it and likes it, so we're starting to gain a little bit of traction in the area. I think the more people realize we are here, the more encompassing the clientele will be. I know they're here. There are very creative people in Tacoma. Some of our really good clients in Seattle are actually Tacoma residents. ON INTERESTING ITEMS HE HAS SALVAGED Ideally, what we would like to have is architectural features that come out of Tacoma remain in Tacoma. [On one job, w]e went into the North Slope Historic District. Somebody from our Seattle store, she lived down here and said, "Come down here. I've got some stuff. I'm doing a re-model." I went up into the master bathroom. I've never gotten one of these before. It was a needle-nosed shower. They are extremely rare. You can find them on the East Coast. Late-1800s. I've never had one in the store. I've seen Earthwise Architectural Salvage expanded to Tacoma last summer. The store, located at 628 East 60th St., on Tacoma's East Side, occupies two floors and approximately 14,000 square feet of the Hillsdale Lumber Company.
Friday, May 31, 2013 â—? Tacoma Daily Index
them in magazines. It's a rib cage shower. You go in to this thing and it has a series of nickel-plated tubes that completely enclose you. You've got a big shower head and then the curtain goes around it. So you go in there and you've got all these dials. You can have it come as a traditional shower and have a shower head and then full on it's coming out completely surrounding you out of these needle-nose headed showers. It had a big porcelain shower pan that came out of this house. It was the last thing in the world I thought I would see. We salvaged that out, as well as the sink in the bathroom and the tub. We spent all day there pulling that thing out. The house was owned and built by one of the first judges in Tacoma. That was his house. He was definitely a man of great importance and wealth because it came from the East Coast and was shipped over probably in the early-1900s. I had never seen one in Seattle and it came out of a Tacoma house. Karen [Carston] brought in these really cool fluted cast iron columns. Each one of them weighed about 250 pounds. I've seen a lot of stuff. I've never had them available in our store. I've never seen them in a salvage store. I think they might have been on a light post. I'm thinking these things are late-1800s or something like that. So I said, "Where did you get them?" She said, "I got them from a local gal who said they were sitting out in a field." I took them up to the Seattle store and I sold them to a guy [who] owns a [historic] hotel in Virginia City, Nevada. He's
going to use them in his hotel. They came out of Tacoma, went to Seattle, and now they are going to Virginia City. It kind of goes against me keeping things here. We would like to keep it here. Offer it up to the local community. If it gets removed from a historic building, now we want to be involved in it because we are part of the community. I'd like to keep it in the Tacoma area. We're not going to take all the Tacoma stuff out of Tacoma and bring it up to Seattle. ON HIS INTEREST IN HISTORIC PRESERVATION That's really the nuts and the bolts of our business -- preservation. I personally like the historic preservation aspect of it, so I bent [the business] in that way. I enjoy the craftsmanship of the older buildings. They paid attention to detail -- great attention to detail -- during the construction phase, as well as the outfitting, unlike we do today. I love going into a house where the door hardware matches the pinch pins, which match the little strike plate that the door hits on. Details that they paid attention to and were important in the past seem not to be so important today. Everything is just a uniform, very cookie-cutter. The uniqueness has kind of gone away. That's what we like to do. We like to preserve. Most of our clientele in that realm, they can't find a lot of this stuff. Certainly there are some reproductions. But a lot of people, when they are doing a restoration, they want to use the original hardware from that time. ON CHANGES IN THE INDUSTRY The waste that I saw within the building industry and demolition, it's really changing now. There is so much more awareness now. When I first started, we went into our first house and we literally took it apart by hand. We salvaged all the lumber, all the doors, and all the siding. We deconstructed the first house, and people were saying, "You're crazy! Why?" The mindset was totally different. They just didn't understand why we were doing it. But this was great wood. You look at the lumber now, it's a renewable resource and you can reharvest it, but there's nothing like the quality of a tree in a natural environment and a natural forest canopy as far as the quality of the material. People now realize it. Right now, reclaimed lumber has become something. When I first started, I didn't know of anyone else in the country that was doing something similar to what I was doing. Now, you can see how it's changed. You look at operations now like I have, they are popping up all over the place. It blows me away. I was happy. I was just so pleased that this type of level of awareness of people is changing in the United States. When I first started, 90 percent of my materials came from demolitions. That has shifted. Now we go in with crews. We get a call from a contractor saying they are demolishing a house or remodeling a house. Now even the homeowners will tell their contractor or they will call us directly. In the minds of the individual homeowners, they want to do the right thing. It's not going to cost them more. As a matter of fact, sometimes we pay. We get there long before the bulldozer, we're not holding up any scheduling issues, and we're salvaging materials that are reused in the local environment. Why wouldn't you do it? Now people are starting to realize there are no losers here. Trees don't get harvested. Historic buildings get preserved. More information about Earthwise Architectural Salvage is available online at earthwise-salvage. com.