October 11, 2004
Change agent | Portland-based Barnstormers turns antique lumber into modern flooring
By Taylor Smith
John Rousseau is a history buff, and it shows in his choice of headquarters for his architectural salvage firm, Barnstormers. The company is housed in a hulking building at the end of a spit of land called Thompson's Point, tucked between I-295 and the end of the Portland Jetport's runways. The 15,000-square-foot building is surrounded by old trailers, dumpsters and other industrial refuse. From a distance, it looks derelict ˆ corrugated steel sheeting wraps most of the frame, and the walls and roof sport a handful of gaps.
But the first thing Rousseau says about the building is that it dates back to the 1880s. It's the last building standing from Portland's old Union Station, he says, and it used to serve as a kind of service garage for the trains that would pull in and out of the station. It's all open space inside the building, with steel trusses that sweep down into decorative curls supporting the roof span.
It's of little wonder Rousseau would have a sentimental attachment to the building. After all, it's his business to find the value in buildings others see as architectural blight. Rousseau, 31, has spent the last 10 years hunting through old barns and industrial buildings in New England and beyond, searching for timber that Barnstormers can recycle ˆ in one form or another ˆ back into the building materials market. Tens of thousands of board feet of domestic lumber ˆ southern longleaf yellow pine, white pine, Douglas fir, oak, chestnut, spruce ˆ are stacked inside the building, and huge piles of rough timber line the outside of the building.
Rousseau started Barnstormers in 1994 as a de-engineering firm that would dismantle and move antique barns for clients, piecing them together as far as hundreds of miles away. But a barn needs to be in very good condition to be moved and reassembled properly, so Rousseau also began salvaging timbers from barns that were slated for demolition. He resold those timbers to contractors looking for old-growth lumber for timberframing projects.
The problem, however, was that the markets for moving antique barns and reselling salvaged timber were tiny, and the costs involved sometimes eclipsed his profits. One banker told Rousseau, who was applying for a line of credit, that his business was like a millstone around his neck. On any given project, Rousseau couldn't know whether he'd be able to turn a profit. "It was kind of heartbreaking to put so much time in and then sit down to do the numbers and they wouldn't add up," he says. "It was either get out of the business or try something different."
So a few years ago Rousseau began thinking of ways he could diversify his business and expand the market for the inventory he'd been stockpiling. For answers, he looked to similar businesses up and down the East Coast; he found that a number of them had successfully transformed their businesses by adding value to their inventory of salvaged timber. Some transformed it into furniture, others re-sawed the lumber into antique flooring. Rousseau saw an opportunity in the market for antique flooring and, two years ago, began shifting his business to tap into that market. The result, he says, has been a banner year. Barnstormers' revenues are on pace to double this year to about $460,000, and he's finding that his supply of antique flooring can barely keep up with the strong demand. "It's a lot more stable selling flooring rather than barns," he says. "The turnaround is so much quicker and I've got a lot more control over [the product]."
A profitable niche
Rousseau grew up in the western Maine town of Newfield and, as a kid, always found himself building things. In high school, he got interested in timberframing, a method of house construction that eschews modern two-by-four frames in favor of large pieces of lumber typically connected with mortis and tenon joints. After a short stint at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, he decided to pursue a degree in architecture, but found he wasn't prepared to commit to the seven years of night classes required by the Boston Architectural Center.
In 1992, however, he found a book on de-engineering and rebuilding barns in the woodworking tent at the Maine Festival in Brunswick. His girlfriend surprised him with the book the following Christmas, and he immediately began looking for ways to get into the business. He landed a job rebuilding a barn on a busy road in Gloucester, Mass., moonlighting on the project while working for a Portland insurance agency. Thanks to the location of the barn, Rousseau had a near-constant stream of curious people stopping by to ask about the project. "I got my first customers through that job," he recalls, and by 1994, Barnstormers was born.
These days, he still finds that customers come to him. Barnstormers doesn't advertise or even have a website, yet Rousseau says business couldn't be better. Most of his customers ˆ contractors, architects and homeowners ˆ come via word of mouth. For local clients, he'll often provide delivery service, but much of his business comes from customers outside of Maine and even overseas. (He recently sold a load of antique flooring to a customer in Stockholm, Sweden.) Corporate clients such as L.L. Bean used to make up a big chunk of his business, but these days roughly 85% of his sales are to the residential housing market, where homeowners want to install antique flooring in their kitchen or decorative barn beams in their living room ceiling.
And those customers are becoming much more educated about antique flooring. "They're reading about it in magazines and seeing it at their friend's house," he says. "They know this is something you can't find at Lumber Liquidators [in Scarborough] or at Home Depot."
Dave Bennink, a Bellingham, Wash.-based consultant with more than a decade of experience in the reusable building materials and building deconstruction industries, agrees with Rousseau, saying that the glut of home remodeling shows on television has helped turn a population of homeowners on to niche areas of the building materials market such as antique flooring. "It's really affecting the market for this kind of stuff," he says. "The actual raw wood has a certain market, but when you start processing the wood into more finished products, that's a better use of the wood."
Dave Damery, a professor in the Building Materials and Wood Technologies department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, says he can't point to any statistical data to back up the growing consumer interest in these kinds of products, but he does see more people incorporating reclaimed lumber into their building plans ˆ whether through re-sawed antique flooring, full timbers used for timberframe projects or old barn boards for wall paneling or cabinets. Some people, says Damery, are using recycled lumber in a bid to keep their structures more environmentally friendly and "green," while others just like the look of old, weathered wood. "Quite a bit of this timber is old growth and has very fine grain structure," he says. "That might fit in with a look that architects and other people want."
The appearance of a particular piece of wood is something Rousseau knows a lot about. Standing in Barnstormers' Portland headquarters, he talks about the striking patina on a load of spruce he bought ˆ sight unseen ˆ from the demolition of an old factory in Jersey City, N.J. The wood broker explained that the timbers had taken on a unique coloring from their exposure to the factory's environment over the years, and Rousseau had to see it. Stroking the top of a freshly sawn board, he marvels at the rich brownish hue. Flipping the board over reveals the true spruce, an almost bright, yellowish color. Rousseau explains that he couldn't find much of a market for the yellowish spruce ˆ it's too much like new wood, he says ˆ but that the weathered side will sell.
Adding value to a commodity
Rousseau knows that there is a finite number of old barns and industrial buildings in New England and beyond that will yield serviceable timbers, but he's not worried about running out of inventory. He estimates there are still hundreds of millions of board feet of antique lumber tucked away in New England and New York. But getting to that wood will cost money.
The best bang for his buck lately has been in old industrial buildings, like the former Camden Yarns mill on Lincoln Street in Lewiston. Though he sometimes can actually charge customers to tear down an old barn and salvage the lumber, Rousseau says it's always a question of whether the amount of salvageable material will offset the time he and his crew will spend on the project. Industrial buildings, however, can be a salvage bonanza. While a typical barn yields roughly 2,000 to 3,000 board feet of lumber, Rousseau expects his crew of four ˆ a full-time foreman and three contract workers ˆ to haul out between 40,000-45,000 board feet from the Lewiston building.
In many cases, Rousseau is paying just for the labor of his crew, often partnering with a demolition company such as Gorham-based Environ Services to prepare the site and remove loads of material before the tear-down begins in earnest. He expects to spend roughly $20,000 on the Lewiston project; a recent job in Lisbon netted Barnstormers more than 60,000 board feet for $50,000.
Rousseau uses a handful of decidedly low-tech methods to find his quarry. He often scans the newspapers searching out bid notices for demolition projects, and has on many occasions pulled over on the side of the road to inquire about the fate of an old barn. Mostly, though, Rousseau gets word about available salvage projects from a long list of industry contacts that he's built up during the past decade.
But despite the big cash outlays required to access the timber, Rousseau knows that his profit margins on the wood will typically run between 25% and 40% ˆ quite a bit more than the single-digit margins he was making reassembling barns and hawking lumber by the beam. His pricing structure for longleaf yellow pine flooring runs from $4 a square foot to $18, depending on the width of the flooring and the quality of the wood.
Strips of pine flooring pocked with nailholes and knots won't command the same price as a nicely quartersawn strip of straight-grained pine, and Rousseau has worked to codify his pricing structure and wood gradings so customers know what they're getting. Rousseau complains about the antique lumber market getting a bad rap from consumers who are left holding the bag after a supplier delivers deficient wood. "There are hundreds of companies getting into re-sawn lumber, and every one has their own grading version," he says.
"Consistency is the hardest part of this business."
But Rousseau says his efforts to achieve consistency are what keeps customers coming back. He says he might have to sort through 10 boards to find one top-grade piece, but that it's worth the trouble to present a uniform product to the customer. He also advises contractors and homeowners how best to install the flooring, including specific instructions to let the wood acclimate to its surroundings. Humid or dry conditions can wreak havoc on wood flooring, resulting in buckled or split strips of wood.
Before the wood even leaves Barnstormers, it has spent days in Rousseau's specially designed kiln, which dries wood at 100 degrees to reduce the moisture content to the recommended range of eight percent to 10%. Damery calls Rousseau's attention to detail ˆ from his grading system to the drying of the wood ˆ a shrewd strategy to make Barnstormers' products stand out from the rest of the market. "The problem with trying to make money in the traditional lumber market is that almost everything is a commodity," he says. "With a commodity, you're a price taker and not a price maker."
Five years down the line, Rousseau sees Barnstormers growing bigger and expanding production of antique flooring. He hopes to add two or three full-time employees and would like to see the company reach $1 million in sales ˆ a goal he says isn't too far-fetched thanks to the increased demand for his product. "It's something that's growing," he says of the antique flooring market. "There are still variables, but it's not going away anytime soon."
But the first thing Rousseau says about the building is that it dates back to the 1880s. It's the last building standing from Portland's old Union Station, he says, and it used to serve as a kind of service garage for the trains that would pull in and out of the station. It's all open space inside the building, with steel trusses that sweep down into decorative curls supporting the roof span.
It's of little wonder Rousseau would have a sentimental attachment to the building. After all, it's his business to find the value in buildings others see as architectural blight. Rousseau, 31, has spent the last 10 years hunting through old barns and industrial buildings in New England and beyond, searching for timber that Barnstormers can recycle ˆ in one form or another ˆ back into the building materials market. Tens of thousands of board feet of domestic lumber ˆ southern longleaf yellow pine, white pine, Douglas fir, oak, chestnut, spruce ˆ are stacked inside the building, and huge piles of rough timber line the outside of the building.
Rousseau started Barnstormers in 1994 as a de-engineering firm that would dismantle and move antique barns for clients, piecing them together as far as hundreds of miles away. But a barn needs to be in very good condition to be moved and reassembled properly, so Rousseau also began salvaging timbers from barns that were slated for demolition. He resold those timbers to contractors looking for old-growth lumber for timberframing projects.
The problem, however, was that the markets for moving antique barns and reselling salvaged timber were tiny, and the costs involved sometimes eclipsed his profits. One banker told Rousseau, who was applying for a line of credit, that his business was like a millstone around his neck. On any given project, Rousseau couldn't know whether he'd be able to turn a profit. "It was kind of heartbreaking to put so much time in and then sit down to do the numbers and they wouldn't add up," he says. "It was either get out of the business or try something different."
So a few years ago Rousseau began thinking of ways he could diversify his business and expand the market for the inventory he'd been stockpiling. For answers, he looked to similar businesses up and down the East Coast; he found that a number of them had successfully transformed their businesses by adding value to their inventory of salvaged timber. Some transformed it into furniture, others re-sawed the lumber into antique flooring. Rousseau saw an opportunity in the market for antique flooring and, two years ago, began shifting his business to tap into that market. The result, he says, has been a banner year. Barnstormers' revenues are on pace to double this year to about $460,000, and he's finding that his supply of antique flooring can barely keep up with the strong demand. "It's a lot more stable selling flooring rather than barns," he says. "The turnaround is so much quicker and I've got a lot more control over [the product]."
A profitable niche
Rousseau grew up in the western Maine town of Newfield and, as a kid, always found himself building things. In high school, he got interested in timberframing, a method of house construction that eschews modern two-by-four frames in favor of large pieces of lumber typically connected with mortis and tenon joints. After a short stint at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, he decided to pursue a degree in architecture, but found he wasn't prepared to commit to the seven years of night classes required by the Boston Architectural Center.
In 1992, however, he found a book on de-engineering and rebuilding barns in the woodworking tent at the Maine Festival in Brunswick. His girlfriend surprised him with the book the following Christmas, and he immediately began looking for ways to get into the business. He landed a job rebuilding a barn on a busy road in Gloucester, Mass., moonlighting on the project while working for a Portland insurance agency. Thanks to the location of the barn, Rousseau had a near-constant stream of curious people stopping by to ask about the project. "I got my first customers through that job," he recalls, and by 1994, Barnstormers was born.
These days, he still finds that customers come to him. Barnstormers doesn't advertise or even have a website, yet Rousseau says business couldn't be better. Most of his customers ˆ contractors, architects and homeowners ˆ come via word of mouth. For local clients, he'll often provide delivery service, but much of his business comes from customers outside of Maine and even overseas. (He recently sold a load of antique flooring to a customer in Stockholm, Sweden.) Corporate clients such as L.L. Bean used to make up a big chunk of his business, but these days roughly 85% of his sales are to the residential housing market, where homeowners want to install antique flooring in their kitchen or decorative barn beams in their living room ceiling.
And those customers are becoming much more educated about antique flooring. "They're reading about it in magazines and seeing it at their friend's house," he says. "They know this is something you can't find at Lumber Liquidators [in Scarborough] or at Home Depot."
Dave Bennink, a Bellingham, Wash.-based consultant with more than a decade of experience in the reusable building materials and building deconstruction industries, agrees with Rousseau, saying that the glut of home remodeling shows on television has helped turn a population of homeowners on to niche areas of the building materials market such as antique flooring. "It's really affecting the market for this kind of stuff," he says. "The actual raw wood has a certain market, but when you start processing the wood into more finished products, that's a better use of the wood."
Dave Damery, a professor in the Building Materials and Wood Technologies department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, says he can't point to any statistical data to back up the growing consumer interest in these kinds of products, but he does see more people incorporating reclaimed lumber into their building plans ˆ whether through re-sawed antique flooring, full timbers used for timberframe projects or old barn boards for wall paneling or cabinets. Some people, says Damery, are using recycled lumber in a bid to keep their structures more environmentally friendly and "green," while others just like the look of old, weathered wood. "Quite a bit of this timber is old growth and has very fine grain structure," he says. "That might fit in with a look that architects and other people want."
The appearance of a particular piece of wood is something Rousseau knows a lot about. Standing in Barnstormers' Portland headquarters, he talks about the striking patina on a load of spruce he bought ˆ sight unseen ˆ from the demolition of an old factory in Jersey City, N.J. The wood broker explained that the timbers had taken on a unique coloring from their exposure to the factory's environment over the years, and Rousseau had to see it. Stroking the top of a freshly sawn board, he marvels at the rich brownish hue. Flipping the board over reveals the true spruce, an almost bright, yellowish color. Rousseau explains that he couldn't find much of a market for the yellowish spruce ˆ it's too much like new wood, he says ˆ but that the weathered side will sell.
Adding value to a commodity
Rousseau knows that there is a finite number of old barns and industrial buildings in New England and beyond that will yield serviceable timbers, but he's not worried about running out of inventory. He estimates there are still hundreds of millions of board feet of antique lumber tucked away in New England and New York. But getting to that wood will cost money.
The best bang for his buck lately has been in old industrial buildings, like the former Camden Yarns mill on Lincoln Street in Lewiston. Though he sometimes can actually charge customers to tear down an old barn and salvage the lumber, Rousseau says it's always a question of whether the amount of salvageable material will offset the time he and his crew will spend on the project. Industrial buildings, however, can be a salvage bonanza. While a typical barn yields roughly 2,000 to 3,000 board feet of lumber, Rousseau expects his crew of four ˆ a full-time foreman and three contract workers ˆ to haul out between 40,000-45,000 board feet from the Lewiston building.
In many cases, Rousseau is paying just for the labor of his crew, often partnering with a demolition company such as Gorham-based Environ Services to prepare the site and remove loads of material before the tear-down begins in earnest. He expects to spend roughly $20,000 on the Lewiston project; a recent job in Lisbon netted Barnstormers more than 60,000 board feet for $50,000.
Rousseau uses a handful of decidedly low-tech methods to find his quarry. He often scans the newspapers searching out bid notices for demolition projects, and has on many occasions pulled over on the side of the road to inquire about the fate of an old barn. Mostly, though, Rousseau gets word about available salvage projects from a long list of industry contacts that he's built up during the past decade.
But despite the big cash outlays required to access the timber, Rousseau knows that his profit margins on the wood will typically run between 25% and 40% ˆ quite a bit more than the single-digit margins he was making reassembling barns and hawking lumber by the beam. His pricing structure for longleaf yellow pine flooring runs from $4 a square foot to $18, depending on the width of the flooring and the quality of the wood.
Strips of pine flooring pocked with nailholes and knots won't command the same price as a nicely quartersawn strip of straight-grained pine, and Rousseau has worked to codify his pricing structure and wood gradings so customers know what they're getting. Rousseau complains about the antique lumber market getting a bad rap from consumers who are left holding the bag after a supplier delivers deficient wood. "There are hundreds of companies getting into re-sawn lumber, and every one has their own grading version," he says.
"Consistency is the hardest part of this business."
But Rousseau says his efforts to achieve consistency are what keeps customers coming back. He says he might have to sort through 10 boards to find one top-grade piece, but that it's worth the trouble to present a uniform product to the customer. He also advises contractors and homeowners how best to install the flooring, including specific instructions to let the wood acclimate to its surroundings. Humid or dry conditions can wreak havoc on wood flooring, resulting in buckled or split strips of wood.
Before the wood even leaves Barnstormers, it has spent days in Rousseau's specially designed kiln, which dries wood at 100 degrees to reduce the moisture content to the recommended range of eight percent to 10%. Damery calls Rousseau's attention to detail ˆ from his grading system to the drying of the wood ˆ a shrewd strategy to make Barnstormers' products stand out from the rest of the market. "The problem with trying to make money in the traditional lumber market is that almost everything is a commodity," he says. "With a commodity, you're a price taker and not a price maker."
Five years down the line, Rousseau sees Barnstormers growing bigger and expanding production of antique flooring. He hopes to add two or three full-time employees and would like to see the company reach $1 million in sales ˆ a goal he says isn't too far-fetched thanks to the increased demand for his product. "It's something that's growing," he says of the antique flooring market. "There are still variables, but it's not going away anytime soon."
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