Hardwood Floors February/March 2026

OBTAINING THE MATERIAL

What do you do when you need to replace a piece of wood from the 1600s? Nutter says you need to know as much as possible about the floor’s history. “You can’t just go to the lumber yard and buy some fir flooring

and put it in and expect it to match. I think the hardest part is matching up the year of the flooring and being able to find stuff from that era,” he explains. “I’ve been doing this for 54 years now, and I have a lot of contacts, so if I can’t find it, it can’t be found.” Universal Floors has a “Choose to Reuse” program that salvages wood from the mid-1700s through the 1950s. If a house is slated for demolition, their team carefully removes the floors, de-nails the material, and stores it by category. “For example, the United States Supreme Court was finished in 1935, so if they are knocking down a house from 1935 and it has rift and quartered oak that is the same wood from old growth trees, we will take that floor up. We manufacture the wood floor strips into herringbone, borders, or whatever is needed,” Lynn explains. “‘Choose to Reuse’ is about as green as you can get. Normally, something is going to the dump, but instead, you are going to breathe another 100 years of life into it.” In recent years, the term “reclaimed wood” has been used somewhat loosely in the consumer space. Over at Olde Wood Limited, they define what it really means. “In our case, antique reclaimed comes from old vintage buildings, 100 to 200 years old. It has to be at least 100 years old before we would even be interested in it. The reason for that is not just the way that it looks, but the weathering, texture, and

Tommy Sancic, co-founder of Olde Wood Limited in Magnolia, Ohio, has spent his career recovering wood from old structures. He notes that when you take a piece of wood and repurpose it for flooring, you are bringing it back to life again. PHOTOS COURTESY OF OLDE WOOD LIMITED

patina inside the wood that you only can get from boards that are 100 to 200 years old. Not something somebody used 10 years ago and repurposed it and technically can classify it as reclaimed,” says Sancic. Of the many places from which the Olde Wood Limited team has obtained wood, one of the most special to Sancic was the F.E. Schumacher Lumber Company’s facility in Hartville, Ohio. His wife Mandy’s grandparents even had worked there at one point. After the complex had been shut down for many years, Sancic had the chance to buy it. “The back portion of that building was built out of 20” by 20” white oak timbers from the 1800s, and they didn’t have any contaminants on them. Those timbers are very rare, very special,” Sancic shares. “The owner of F.E. Schumacher was a connoisseur back then; he went into the woods and looked for a specific tree that they would cut for his manufacturing facility that he was building. They would mark these trees in the woods that he wanted, and they were of a prime grade. They cut those trees and made their first factory in 1889 out of them.” Now, the wood from that structure has been restored as hardwood flooring.

the magazine of the national wood flooring association

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