May 1, 2006
FIRST PERSON: Treasure hunter | The owner of an architectural salvage company describes finding value in what others discard
By Alice Dunn
Owner, Portland Architectural Salvage
It's hard to describe to somebody what I do for a living. I buy and sell house parts, but it's like I'm a found artist, too, because I take a lot of things that no one can really see are beautiful and I present them in a way in which people can see that they're nice or that they could be nice. Everything's got a story, every piece. I could tell you where every single thing that's in this store came from. And one story's longer than the next, you know? So it's fun. It's the best job in the world. It's been an interesting road for me because I didn't ever think it would be this big.'
I've always loved old stuff. I don't know why. It's just kind of an aesthetic thing. Twenty years ago ˆ I wasn't even in business then ˆ I was looking just to renovate my [own property]. I moved here from San Francisco, and buildings were so cheap here. I bought four apartment buildings next door to each other, right next to India Street, from these two little old Italian ladies that used to collect rent money with a baseball bat on Friday nights. Rough buildings.
I went into those apartment buildings and I thought, "Gee, these are so ugly, and they just need everything. Where do I start?" I realized that I needed to get old doors, I needed to get some old flooring, I wanted to put back the tin ceilings that were on the kitchen ceiling, so that's basically what I did. I found places in New Hampshire and Boston and I started going down and buying stuff from them. And when I was buying stuff down there I said, "Jesus, this is so expensive. How could a normal person come down here and spend a hundred and fifty dollars just to replace a bedroom door on an apartment building? That's outrageous."
So I had a summer home up in Casco on a lake. On weekends I'd drive out there and I'd work on it, and I'd always go to the dump. And I'm looking around and seeing all these beautiful things ˆ doors and shutters and windows ˆ that people are just throwing out. I'm thinking, "Wow, this is awesome," because these guys are giving me this stuff that I really needed and I didn't have to go to Boston anymore and spend this money. They wouldn't take my money. They said, "We'll lose our jobs if we take money from you." In a lot of towns in Maine, you can't buy stuff from a dump.
So what I used to do is just bring them things in exchange for stuff. And then I started going to all these other dumps. So that's really how I started, by going to dumps in the state of Maine and realizing what was there and figuring out how I could barter for it until I got going. That's how I got my inventory together for my first store, back in 1993.
I was an antique freak anyway. I used to read Uncle Henry's religiously. I've got a volume one, edition one of Uncle Henry's framed in my office. My idea of a great night was to get my Uncle Henry's and take a hot bath and have a good single malt scotch. I'd go through my book and circle my things and talk to all the people from up north. From the overwhelming response of people that had tons of stuff that they were willing to sell and was sitting and rotting in their basement, I realized that there should be a place where people can sell their stuff and [where] people that needed this stuff [can] go and buy it at a reasonable price.
Everything and the kitchen sink
My first storefront was on Washington Avenue next to a redemption center that's no longer there. The market was overwhelmingly large. Everybody that wanted to renovate buildings the way I wanted to needed the same exact stuff. And all I was doing was taking out the legwork for them going to dumps or knocking on doors. I just became a middleman for reusable, salvageable product. So it's been a progression.
I went from 300 sq. ft. to 700 sq. ft. to 1,000 sq. ft. to 4,000 sq. ft. to 10,000 sq. ft. This [three-story building on the corner of Preble Street and Kennebec Street in Portland that I just bought] is my last hurrah. When I'm done here, I'm finished. We plan on opening on the third week in May.
There's such a high, high need for what I do. If you go to every city in the United States you'll find salvage companies. If you go to San Francisco, it's Mega Salvage. New York City has five big salvage companies. Stamford, Conn., has United House Wrecking. These are great big salvage companies. We have in Maine at least four salvage companies. There's one in Kennebunkport called Old House Parts. There's one in Augusta called FIFIS, which stands for Finally I Found It Salvage, and then there's a really high-end dealer up in Castine. I just happen to be in the city that has the highest population of people, and the most moneyed city, too, in the state.
We do a huge business. Last month I did $80,000 out of that one little store [on 919 Congress Street] with one other woman [Megan Lyons, store manager]. Renovating homes is very trendy. Buying houses in Portland, it's already come and gone, but it's all over the world, it's all over the country, everyone's doing it. We have a huge Internet business. We have a huge eBay business. People contact me everyday. I have people calling me from California for sinks. I have people calling me from Utah for black cherry French doors. I got people calling me from San Juan, Puerto Rico, for garden stuff. And then we've got the interior designers [with] their shabby chic-edness. They want stuff that's got really nice primitive paint, that's got a look. My biggest clientele is interior designers, antique dealers, but mostly the homeowners [who are buying] their first house. People want old material to fix up what they have that's old. That's what they want.
I'm always on the road. I work a lot. I go all over the United States, I do antique shows, make connections. I'm getting ready to go to [the Brimfield Antiques Show in Brimfield, Massachusetts in May]. It's a weeklong show. I get down there on a Saturday night. The show doesn't open 'til Tuesday, but I spend Saturday, Sunday, Monday going around to everybody as they're unloading their trucks and buying stuff as it's coming off the truck, packing it onto my truck. Then I call on my guys, "Come down here and get a load." They drive down, drive the truck back, dump it, bring an empty truck down. By the time they get down, I've got more stuff. So that's how I buy. I used to have a friend that would bring stuff over for me from Italy. I'm working with a guy right now from England, and I'm working with another guy from Italy now.
Every day, I get twenty people that pull up to the front of the store who've got a big truck full of stuff [and say] "Alice, do you want to buy this?" I'll go out and say, "Well, I don't want this, but I'll take this, this, and this. Give me your price." So they price it ˆ one price, that's it ˆ and if it's reasonable, I buy it right off the truck and it goes into inventory. Homeowners that rip up a bathroom, [who say] "I want to put a new bathroom in," might want to sell their old tub and their old sink. They'll call me on the phone, they'll bring it over, I look at it, and I buy it.
I've been doing this for so long, I know what sells and what doesn't sell. I know what sits in the basement. I know what I donate at the end of the year. A lot of what I buy ends up going up to the nonprofit building material bank up in Gray. Once every three, four, six months, I go through my inventory, and the stuff that I bought that's not selling ˆ because there's a little blemish in the sink or there's a stain here ˆ I donate to them, and they sell it. I'm only really gonna buy now what resells because of this [new building] project.
I live off of doors. Doors, stained glass windows and garden elements ˆ I live off of those three things. Pure, period plumbing fixtures that are perfect looking that don't need to be refinished? Those are very, very trendy now. I cannot keep kitchen sinks in stock. I sell six kitchen sinks a week. There's a certain type of kitchen sink that people want ˆ it's gotta have an apron in the front, drainboard on both sides or a drainboard on one side, perfectly white, with fixtures they can put out of it to replace with a gooseneck, trendy fixture. A really good kitchen sink will be anywhere from $500 to $1,500 dollars. If I get a gorgeous soapstone kitchen sink that came out of a farm and it's six feet long, that's an $1,800 dollar sink.
Basically, pricing happens according to what the object is. If you can buy wood and you can get it for two dollars a square foot, we'd sell it for four bucks a square foot. Why? 'Cause we gotta go get it, we gotta pull it out of the floor and transport it. There's always labor involved when you do salvage ˆ going to get it, running trucks to take it, storing it, handling it. There are handling fees, too, so that's all built in. So it's safe to say that we mark things up one time. If I buy it for $2, it goes in the store for $4, and I discount from there. If I buy it for a $100, it'll go in the store for $200, and I can discount it from there.
There are other things that I have a little bit more pricing control over in terms of exclusivity. If something comes along like a five-and-a-half-foot bathtub? I can buy fives and four-and-a-halfs all day. When I get a five-and-a-half-foot tub, I know I have people that will pay me $1,500 for every single one I can bring in here. In that case, I will wait and get the $1,500 dollars because it's backbreaking work to drive up to Searsport, an hour and 45 minutes each direction, with another person, to pull it out of the third floor of an inn and pay the owner five hundred bucks for it. There's more money built into it. So it's very subjective.
It's hard to describe to somebody what I do for a living. I buy and sell house parts, but it's like I'm a found artist, too, because I take a lot of things that no one can really see are beautiful and I present them in a way in which people can see that they're nice or that they could be nice. Everything's got a story, every piece. I could tell you where every single thing that's in this store came from. And one story's longer than the next, you know? So it's fun. It's the best job in the world. It's been an interesting road for me because I didn't ever think it would be this big.'
I've always loved old stuff. I don't know why. It's just kind of an aesthetic thing. Twenty years ago ˆ I wasn't even in business then ˆ I was looking just to renovate my [own property]. I moved here from San Francisco, and buildings were so cheap here. I bought four apartment buildings next door to each other, right next to India Street, from these two little old Italian ladies that used to collect rent money with a baseball bat on Friday nights. Rough buildings.
I went into those apartment buildings and I thought, "Gee, these are so ugly, and they just need everything. Where do I start?" I realized that I needed to get old doors, I needed to get some old flooring, I wanted to put back the tin ceilings that were on the kitchen ceiling, so that's basically what I did. I found places in New Hampshire and Boston and I started going down and buying stuff from them. And when I was buying stuff down there I said, "Jesus, this is so expensive. How could a normal person come down here and spend a hundred and fifty dollars just to replace a bedroom door on an apartment building? That's outrageous."
So I had a summer home up in Casco on a lake. On weekends I'd drive out there and I'd work on it, and I'd always go to the dump. And I'm looking around and seeing all these beautiful things ˆ doors and shutters and windows ˆ that people are just throwing out. I'm thinking, "Wow, this is awesome," because these guys are giving me this stuff that I really needed and I didn't have to go to Boston anymore and spend this money. They wouldn't take my money. They said, "We'll lose our jobs if we take money from you." In a lot of towns in Maine, you can't buy stuff from a dump.
So what I used to do is just bring them things in exchange for stuff. And then I started going to all these other dumps. So that's really how I started, by going to dumps in the state of Maine and realizing what was there and figuring out how I could barter for it until I got going. That's how I got my inventory together for my first store, back in 1993.
I was an antique freak anyway. I used to read Uncle Henry's religiously. I've got a volume one, edition one of Uncle Henry's framed in my office. My idea of a great night was to get my Uncle Henry's and take a hot bath and have a good single malt scotch. I'd go through my book and circle my things and talk to all the people from up north. From the overwhelming response of people that had tons of stuff that they were willing to sell and was sitting and rotting in their basement, I realized that there should be a place where people can sell their stuff and [where] people that needed this stuff [can] go and buy it at a reasonable price.
Everything and the kitchen sink
My first storefront was on Washington Avenue next to a redemption center that's no longer there. The market was overwhelmingly large. Everybody that wanted to renovate buildings the way I wanted to needed the same exact stuff. And all I was doing was taking out the legwork for them going to dumps or knocking on doors. I just became a middleman for reusable, salvageable product. So it's been a progression.
I went from 300 sq. ft. to 700 sq. ft. to 1,000 sq. ft. to 4,000 sq. ft. to 10,000 sq. ft. This [three-story building on the corner of Preble Street and Kennebec Street in Portland that I just bought] is my last hurrah. When I'm done here, I'm finished. We plan on opening on the third week in May.
There's such a high, high need for what I do. If you go to every city in the United States you'll find salvage companies. If you go to San Francisco, it's Mega Salvage. New York City has five big salvage companies. Stamford, Conn., has United House Wrecking. These are great big salvage companies. We have in Maine at least four salvage companies. There's one in Kennebunkport called Old House Parts. There's one in Augusta called FIFIS, which stands for Finally I Found It Salvage, and then there's a really high-end dealer up in Castine. I just happen to be in the city that has the highest population of people, and the most moneyed city, too, in the state.
We do a huge business. Last month I did $80,000 out of that one little store [on 919 Congress Street] with one other woman [Megan Lyons, store manager]. Renovating homes is very trendy. Buying houses in Portland, it's already come and gone, but it's all over the world, it's all over the country, everyone's doing it. We have a huge Internet business. We have a huge eBay business. People contact me everyday. I have people calling me from California for sinks. I have people calling me from Utah for black cherry French doors. I got people calling me from San Juan, Puerto Rico, for garden stuff. And then we've got the interior designers [with] their shabby chic-edness. They want stuff that's got really nice primitive paint, that's got a look. My biggest clientele is interior designers, antique dealers, but mostly the homeowners [who are buying] their first house. People want old material to fix up what they have that's old. That's what they want.
I'm always on the road. I work a lot. I go all over the United States, I do antique shows, make connections. I'm getting ready to go to [the Brimfield Antiques Show in Brimfield, Massachusetts in May]. It's a weeklong show. I get down there on a Saturday night. The show doesn't open 'til Tuesday, but I spend Saturday, Sunday, Monday going around to everybody as they're unloading their trucks and buying stuff as it's coming off the truck, packing it onto my truck. Then I call on my guys, "Come down here and get a load." They drive down, drive the truck back, dump it, bring an empty truck down. By the time they get down, I've got more stuff. So that's how I buy. I used to have a friend that would bring stuff over for me from Italy. I'm working with a guy right now from England, and I'm working with another guy from Italy now.
Every day, I get twenty people that pull up to the front of the store who've got a big truck full of stuff [and say] "Alice, do you want to buy this?" I'll go out and say, "Well, I don't want this, but I'll take this, this, and this. Give me your price." So they price it ˆ one price, that's it ˆ and if it's reasonable, I buy it right off the truck and it goes into inventory. Homeowners that rip up a bathroom, [who say] "I want to put a new bathroom in," might want to sell their old tub and their old sink. They'll call me on the phone, they'll bring it over, I look at it, and I buy it.
I've been doing this for so long, I know what sells and what doesn't sell. I know what sits in the basement. I know what I donate at the end of the year. A lot of what I buy ends up going up to the nonprofit building material bank up in Gray. Once every three, four, six months, I go through my inventory, and the stuff that I bought that's not selling ˆ because there's a little blemish in the sink or there's a stain here ˆ I donate to them, and they sell it. I'm only really gonna buy now what resells because of this [new building] project.
I live off of doors. Doors, stained glass windows and garden elements ˆ I live off of those three things. Pure, period plumbing fixtures that are perfect looking that don't need to be refinished? Those are very, very trendy now. I cannot keep kitchen sinks in stock. I sell six kitchen sinks a week. There's a certain type of kitchen sink that people want ˆ it's gotta have an apron in the front, drainboard on both sides or a drainboard on one side, perfectly white, with fixtures they can put out of it to replace with a gooseneck, trendy fixture. A really good kitchen sink will be anywhere from $500 to $1,500 dollars. If I get a gorgeous soapstone kitchen sink that came out of a farm and it's six feet long, that's an $1,800 dollar sink.
Basically, pricing happens according to what the object is. If you can buy wood and you can get it for two dollars a square foot, we'd sell it for four bucks a square foot. Why? 'Cause we gotta go get it, we gotta pull it out of the floor and transport it. There's always labor involved when you do salvage ˆ going to get it, running trucks to take it, storing it, handling it. There are handling fees, too, so that's all built in. So it's safe to say that we mark things up one time. If I buy it for $2, it goes in the store for $4, and I discount from there. If I buy it for a $100, it'll go in the store for $200, and I can discount it from there.
There are other things that I have a little bit more pricing control over in terms of exclusivity. If something comes along like a five-and-a-half-foot bathtub? I can buy fives and four-and-a-halfs all day. When I get a five-and-a-half-foot tub, I know I have people that will pay me $1,500 for every single one I can bring in here. In that case, I will wait and get the $1,500 dollars because it's backbreaking work to drive up to Searsport, an hour and 45 minutes each direction, with another person, to pull it out of the third floor of an inn and pay the owner five hundred bucks for it. There's more money built into it. So it's very subjective.
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