Field Day at Vintage Lumber in Gay, Georgia

On March 21st, Willis Everett of Vintage Lumber Sales opened his campus to a group of designers, architects and builders to show them how they acquire, process and design and build with antique lumber.  There was a captive audience for Jim Flournoy, THE diver for Vintage Lumber, as he shared stories and images from different diving trips in the southeast.  We were given a thorough tour of the mill with demonstrations of all of their machinery from creating moldings for a stair rail to reducing large heart pine beams into actual flooring planks.

Take a look inside Vintage Lumber......

Vintage Lumber is located in Gay, Georgia just over an hour outside of Atlanta.  Willis Everett decided to open this business back in 1982 when he could not find the varieties of wood that he wanted to use to build his own home in Gay.  He began collecting antique wood, and if any of you know Willis, he is a collector.  Next thing you know, he had collected enough to start his own business.

Vintage Lumber's office building is a collector's item itself.  It was the original bank in downtown Gay and the original safe and cashier window are still there.  When you enter the main office building, you are greeted the many old tools and artifacts that Willis has on display.

The door knocker and door hardware above are two of my favorite pieces on the  wall.

In the library Willis has carefully incorporated sculpture, skulls and pieces of pottery in and around his book shelves.

These bowls are turned out of wood from Vintage Lumber by a wood turner outside of Gay.

The main office space of Vintage Lumber is where we met before beginning the tour.  There are examples of molding, millwork, beams and corbels throughout the space all from different wood and with different finishes offered by Vintage.

Millwork sections on the wall and beam sections to the left keep the eye wandering throughout this space.

Jim did a great job explaining his process of bringing cypress trees out of the swamps of Apalachacola.

The first demonstration in the mill was reducing full size heart pine beams into planks of uniform width and thickness to be used for flooring.  These are the beams before running through the machine.

The beam is guided through a "Resaw" machine that is programmed to the exact size for each of the wood planks to be cut.

Once the plank is sliced away from the beam, it is set aside with the other planks and the remainder of the beam is returned for another slice.

This was the result of one of those massive beams.

A lot of the old wood that arrives at Vintage was once another structure such as an old barn or a church.  This means there are a lot of original nails or other metal which held the structure together.  A metal detector helps locate these nails, and other metal, that are then removed, one by one, by hand.

The Vintage Lumber mill is made up of several large warehouses where they store quite an impressive inventory of antique wood as well as some newer wood.

There are many finishes available for wood flooring, some clients prefer a smooth, stained, hardwood floor where others like more character.  This plank below is being sent through a wire brushing machine that will give the plank a rough finish.  There are two wire brushes, depending the desired amount of texture.  

The next portion of the tour is always impressive.  Vintage has over 500 molding profiles. 

Once they have created a molding template for you, it stays on file in this room.

Willis randomly selected one of the profiles to run through the machine so we could see the process.

We saw earlier how a reclaimed beam is repurposed into flooring but what about when Jim brings Willis whole trees recovered from the swamps.  They first have to be kiln dried and inspected for insects.  Once that is done, these trees get transformed into flooring, millwork, you name it.

Jim first sawed off the rough, uneven base of this river recovered cypress tree.

Then they used a machine that sliced uniform planks, similar to the first demonstration we saw.

The result, a colorful, river recovered cypress plank that could be used for flooring, wall panels, or just about anything.

The last demonstration was by Hugh Patrick whose family has been in the wood turning business since 1949.  

Everyone left with a parting gift: blue bird houses made from river recovered cypress.  There were also some hand-made boxes and sections of the molding that was created right before our eyes.

 I think the most important thing to be learned from a visit to Vintage Lumber is the longevity of the business and the employees, despite the recent economic strain that put so many out of business.  Willis has a staff, in the mill and the main office, that averages 12 years of employment.  Once you experience a tour like this you walk away knowing that Willis will be your antique lumber source.