Architectural Salvage Yards: What to Expect and What We Found….

We’re still right at the start of renovating our house and, if you’ve been following along, you’ll know that we’re very much taking our time with it.

We both want to do it right and really bring the house back to life rather than rush through the rooms just so we can say they’re finished. It’s important to us that we don’t just fill the house with brand new things, even though I’m quickly discovering that doing exactly that would be so much easier, so much quicker and, actually, quite often so much cheaper too.

Because one thing I’ve learned since we moved into an old house is that old things are rarely the cheap option. 😂

Obviously, there are bargains to be found, but the good quality older things that we’re looking for often cost more than their modern equivalents. They’re also much harder to find because when you have something specific in your head, you can’t just Google it, order it and have it delivered the next day.

But that’s also what makes it so much more fun.

We’re genuinely loving the time we spend looking for things for the house. We’ll wander around antique shops, charity shops, vintage shops and markets, keep an eye on Marketplace and basically look anywhere that might have something that feels right for the house.

We’re also quite happy to have plenty of ‘do-for-now’ things around the house while we wait to find exactly the right thing. I’d much rather live with something that’s OK for six months than spend money on something new that we don’t really love just because we want a room to look finished.

It definitely means the house is going to take us much longer to finish, but we’re absolutely fine with that. I actually think we’re enjoying the process more because we’re not putting ourselves under pressure to get everything done straight away.

Our first trip to an architectural salvage yard

One thing we hadn’t tried until this week was an architectural salvage yard.

We’ve talked about visiting one for ages because they sound like exactly the kind of place where we might find some of the things we’re looking for, but we really had no idea what to expect. Every salvage yard is completely different and, because so much of what they sell is reclaimed, the stock can change completely from one visit to the next.

That’s part of the appeal though. You never really know what you’re going to find.

So this week, we decided to go for a wander around a local architectural salvage yard to see what was there.

And I think we may have found our new favourite way to spend an afternoon. 😂

What do you actually find at an architectural salvage yard?

I think I was expecting lots of doors, fireplaces and maybe a few old sinks, but there was so much more than that.

There were stacks of old stone, reclaimed bricks, floor tiles and paving alongside fireplaces, doors, windows and all sorts of bits and pieces that had obviously been rescued from old houses and buildings.

Then there were the smaller things that I could happily spend hours rummaging through – door handles, knobs, catches, brackets and all those little details that you probably wouldn’t even think about until you see them.

Some things were beautifully restored and ready to go straight into a house, while other things definitely needed a bit of imagination. And I think that’s probably the key to visiting somewhere like this – you need to look at things and imagine what they could be rather than just what they are sitting there in the yard.

Old doesn’t necessarily mean cheap

I definitely wouldn’t go to an architectural salvage yard assuming everything is going to be a bargain.

Some things absolutely can be, particularly if you’re prepared to do some cleaning, sanding, restoring or repurposing yourself. But other things can be surprisingly expensive, especially when you start looking at good quality pieces that are unusual, old or difficult to find.

For us, that doesn’t necessarily make them bad value though. We’re trying to look at what we buy for the house differently these days and I’d rather spend a little bit more on an old piece that we absolutely love and that feels as though it belongs here than buy something cheaper that we’ll probably want to replace in a couple of years.

That doesn’t mean we suddenly have an unlimited renovation budget – very much the opposite. 😂 It just means we’re being more selective about what we spend it on.

And there definitely are bargains to be found if you’re prepared to rummage.

Our £4 Victorian cupboard finds

One of my favourite little finds was a set of old brass knobs for our built-in Victorian cupboards.

There were already knobs on the cupboards, but we wanted something slightly bigger so they’d make more of a feature of them rather than just blending in. We found exactly the sort of thing we had in mind for £4 each, and I think it’s little details like this that are going to make such a difference as we gradually work our way around the house.

We also bought an old lock for one of our sash windows. Some of the existing locks are a bit dodgy and need replacing, but we’d much rather replace them with something old that feels right for the windows than put shiny new modern ones on.

There was a huge box absolutely full of old window locks that had been salvaged from other buildings, so we stood there digging through them until we found one that looked as though it might work.

It cost £4, which will be an absolute bargain if it fits. We’ve only bought one for now to test it and, if it works, we’ll go back and have another rummage for enough to do the rest.

Our salvage yard slate finds

The thing that probably got us most excited was the slate, although our plans for it changed about three times while we were wandering around. 😂

We initially found one piece of slate for £5 and immediately started trying to work out what we could do with it. We decided it would make a lovely little table for the garden and then found some random square concrete bricks for £1 each that we thought would work perfectly as the base.

Then we carried on looking and found an even bigger piece of slate.

This one was much more substantial – around two inches thick – and cost £20. As soon as we saw it, we thought it would make a brilliant little bench against the wall near our water feature.

The slate is almost exactly the same colour as the slate chippings we’ve already used around the water feature and in the borders around the house, so it should fit in perfectly. We also have about 500 old slate bricks that we bought a while ago for a patio area we’re planning in the garden, which gave us another idea.

Instead of buying the £1 concrete bricks, we could use some of our slate bricks to make the legs for the bench. And if we were doing that, we might as well use the same slate bricks to make the base for our £5 table too.

So the concrete bricks went back where we found them and we came home with £25 worth of reclaimed slate and a plan to turn it into two completely unique pieces for the garden using things we already have for the bases.

This is exactly the kind of thing I love about shopping this way. We could have gone online and bought a little garden table and a bench and had them delivered within a few days, but where would be the fun in that?

Instead, we found a £5 piece of slate, came up with one idea, changed the plan when we found the bigger £20 piece and ended up with two little projects that should fit perfectly with the garden we’re slowly creating.

The one that got away…

There was also one thing that very nearly came home with us but somehow got left behind – a funny little stone head that we both loved for the garden. 😂

We picked it up, put it down, wandered away, went back for another look and somehow still managed to leave without it.

I have a feeling that if it’s still there the next time we visit, we might not be quite so restrained.

Is it worth visiting an architectural salvage yard?

For us, absolutely.

I wouldn’t necessarily go expecting to find the exact thing you need on your first visit, and I definitely wouldn’t assume that everything is going to be cheaper just because it’s old or reclaimed. If you need something very specific in a particular size and you need it next week, shopping this way could be quite frustrating.

But if you enjoy the hunt, it’s brilliant.

We went with very little idea of what we’d find and came home with brass knobs for our Victorian cupboards, an old sash window lock to test, two pieces of slate that are going to become garden furniture and a slight regret about leaving a funny stone head behind.

More importantly, we had a genuinely lovely time wandering around together, rummaging through boxes and coming up with ideas for things we hadn’t even considered before we arrived.

For us, renovating this house isn’t just about getting to the point where every room is finished. We want to enjoy finding the things that go into it, learning a bit about what would originally have been here and gradually putting some of the character back that’s disappeared over the years.

We know doing it this way will take longer and we know it won’t always be the cheapest way to do things. There’ll probably be plenty of ‘do-for-now’ furniture around the house while we wait for the right things to turn up too.

But we’re completely OK with that.

Finding everything is turning out to be half the fun.

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