D&D Salvage

I did a little salvage today. There is an old garage/car parts place called D&D Motors that went out of business a few years ago. For any locals reading, D&D Motors occupied the corrugated buildings behind Walgreen’s, and next to the new Eureka Natural Foods.





The building is nothing to look at from the outside. In fact, it is a down-right eye-sore. It has been there a while, though. The place is framed in old-growth redwood, and about a quarter of one of the buildings was all done in redwood beadboard. I suspect they were originally offices or machine shops for the wool mill that sat at the corner of 14th & Broadway at the turn of the century.

The beadboard on the walls has been beat to crap over the years, but the ceiling was in surprisingly good shape. A friend of a friend got the salvage rights to the place and for the past month we’ve been playing phone tag to try and get in there and strip out the beadboard. I didn’t get it for free, but because I did the work, I got it for .50 cents a lineal foot (it is 1X6 double bead board) and then a certain amount for my labor.

There are a couple of really good things about. Because it was on the ceiling, it is in great shape and has very little paint on it. Also, everything I got was in 10-foot lengths. I got enough to do the utility room in floor to ceiling beadboard. It should look cool. The room has 10.5 foot ceilings, but I can do a frieze like I did in the mudroom, with a 1X12 board, and then stencil it.

It was a lot of work and extremely messy. There was a good half inch of dirt and dust on top of the boards. Just huge clouds of dirt and dust billowed out when a board would get away from you and hit the ground. The friend of a friend who was able to get us in there to get the stuff out was not a lot of help. He is an older gentleman and not well suited for this type of work. It was pretty much me on a ladder for 3 hours. It was a lot of work, but think it will be worth it.

Man About Town

So there I was this morning, standing in front of the bakery eating my Wednesday morning croissant and reading the headlines on the paper machines, when I woman approached me. She said, “You probable don’t remember me but you came to a garage sale I had a few years ago and asked about some stained-glass windows I had”. She was right, I didn’t remember her, which was odd because I go to maybe 2 garage sales a year. If they are more than a half a block out of my way I won’t bother

I like a good deal as much as the next guy, but I don’t have the patience for garage sales. There is just so much crap. In order to find something really good at a garage sale, you either need to be really committed and go to a lot of garage sales, or you need to be really lucky. I am neither. I struggled to remember her, and I tried to be polite, but I just couldn’t recall going to her house.

She described the windows to me and I still didn’t remember. She told me the garage sale was only a block or so from my house. Still, I drew a blank. Finally she described the house to me, and I remembered the sale. The house is on the way to a market that recently relocated to a larger location. I no longer go by there, but I now remembered the house and the sale. The house is another Victorian, although not quite as nice as The Petch House (as if any house could be). It’s a little on the plain side, but still a nice house.

I remembered the sale because I actually left with something. In her backyard there was a stack of 6 or 7 of those large foam, inter-locking pads you see put down on finished floors during construction. They were sitting in the backyard in the mud and I asked how much she wanted for them. She said they were free if I would just get them out of her yard. I happily scooped them up. Each pad is about 3 feet square and when inter-locked with each other they make a nice walking surface so you don’t scratch up floors or track dirt around the house during a major project. They were covered in mud but I drooled over them. They’re one of those things you would never see in a DIYers home. These could instantly lend an air of credibility to any project I do.

I took them home and threw them in my side yard were they sat for about 9 months until somebody stole them. I never did get to use them. Anyway, the woman said she still had the windows and asked if I wanted them. She also would be replacing the windows in her current home, a Craftsman Bungalow, in about 2 weeks and asked if I wanted those as well. I instantly said yes, and then asked how many there were. She said she has a “VW bus full” right now, and in 2 weeks there will be 28 sashes (I know the plural of sash is sash, but I refuse to use it) coming out of the bungalow.

Again, I said I was interested, but politely cautioned her that I wouldn’t be able to pay her for them. She said that’s fine, she just doesn’t want to pay the disposal fee to the company replacing the windows. At this point, it was all I could do to keep from asking her if she was putting in vinyl windows. I was afraid if she said yes, I might climb up on one of the newspaper machines and break in to a sermon decrying the evils of vinyl windows. I decided I didn’t want to spoil the deal of getting a bunch of free windows, so I didn’t take the conversation down that path.

We left the delivery of the sashes (there, I said it again) up in the air. She knows where I live and said she would bring them by. I told her if she sees my truck out front, I’m home, otherwise leave them on the side of the house. I’m not sure what I’ll do with them, but at least they’re not going to the dump.

Official Grind Tester

The head of production where I work is a heck of a nice guy. We are polar opposites when it comes to politics, and to a less extent when it comes to social issues, but we have found common ground in enough areas that we get along very well. Our conversations mostly stick our common interests, and that is the main reason we get along so well. Those few times when we do venture off in to politics or social issues, it is very interesting that we can often agree on what the problems are with this country, but it’s the solutions to those problems where we differ greatly. Sound familiar?

Anyway, wood working and tools are a common interest, and we are both self-reliant and self-starters. He doesn’t really care much about the fact that I’m restoring an old Victorian –he lives in a 70s Ranch Home, but we both have a passion for working with old redwood and building things. He makes the most amazing wood puzzles you have ever seen in your life. Other things we have in common are reusing old stuff, we are both appalled by waste, and we're both cheap bastards. Oh, and we're both Ebay junkies.

When I mentioned that I was getting all the old tile out of The Oberon Saloon it wasn’t the fact that it was 100 year old tile that peaked his interest, it was the fact that I was getting $1000 worth of tile for free and all it took was a little hard work. That’s the cool part.

He is in his early 60s and every year his sons give him tools from Christmas. He probably has the most complete shop of anyone I know. Last week I was talking about The Oberon tile again because I had started to clean it. I mentioned that the tough part was going to be getting the grout remnants off. I mentioned that the advice I was given was to use a dermal tool and he kind of muttered that the dermal tool would take me forever.

He asked me to bring in a tile for him to fool with so I found a really bad one that had several thick clumps of grout still on it. I brought it in to work on Monday. He brought it back to me on Tuesday and it was spotless. Not a hint of grout on it. The tool he ended up using was a disc sander.



He said it took a matter of seconds to clean the grout off. Obviously I’m going to be trying this method and I thanked him profusely. He then asked me to bring him in 10 more tiles – really bad ones, because he wants to try some other things. He’s going to try several different grits of sandpaper to see which works best, and try some other tools in his arsenal. I have no doubt that on Monday I’m going to have 10 cleaned tiles and several solutions for cleaning them.

A Tile Smashing Good Time

I made another trip down to smash up more salvaged tile today. I only a had a few hours, but I hit a vein of easily obtainable tiles, so I made a good haul. I may go down tomorrow one last time. We’ll see how I feel. I’ve been running crazy for the last week and a half. If it wasn’t the tile then it was the plumbing. I got a lot done but my house and my life is a chaotic mess because of it.

I’ve been able to get 15 boxes that are the same size, and then another 4 boxes of different sizes. I took one of the 15 boxes and counted 206 tiles in it. They are 2-inch hex tiles so I figured 36 tiles per sq ft. That works out to roughly 5.5 sq ft per box, times 15 boxes, means I have roughly 85 sq ft of tile. Of course, there will be some waste when I go to clean it, but I’ll assume the other 4 boxes of varying sizes will account for the waste.

I have about 70 sq ft of floor space to do. With a normal installation I would order an extra 5% to 10% to account for waste during installation. Considering the tile, I think this will be a worst case scenario when it comes to waste, so lets say I need 80 sq ft. As I estimated, I have 85 sq ft.

This all assumes I don’t do a boarder. If I do a 6-inch boarder of some other tile, then it puts me in a better position. I’m leaning away from a boarder now because the salvaged hex tile is half inch thick and the new tiles, or at least the samples I got, are only 3/16 of an inch thick. I would have to shim all of the boarder area by 5/16 of an inch. If I’m off a little bit it could look crappy.

In other news, I posted a question about cleaning grout off tile over at Urban Revivals on thier Discussion Blog. It’s not really a blog and it’s not really a forum. You ask a question using a web form and a few days later, if they answer, they post your question and an answer to their “blog”. Anyway, someone else asked the same question I did only a day before I did, so they posted their question and answer. The question was, how do you remove old grout from salvaged tile. The answer was a dermel Tool. Specifically, here was the Q&A….


Aggie of Chicago writes: How do you remove adhesive from used ceramic tile?

Urban Revivals replies: We use a dremel tool with stone grinder bits. Set the variable speed so you can grind it off the tile, without going so fast that you nick the tiles.

I think Stucco House also came up with this response, so she gets a gold star by her name. Of course, the best part of this is, it means I get to have hours and hours of fun grinding grout off tiles. I’m fortunate this is good grout grinding weather. I’ve been thinking about though, I really don’t have to get it all off. In most places the grout was only an eight of an inch think or less. In some of repaired areas it was thicker, but those make up a small minority of the tiles. All I have to do is take it down below the surface of the tile and when I regrout you’ll never see it. Either way, it’s going to be a butt-load of work. I just have to keep reminding myself that I’m saving seven or eight hundred dollars. That is a motivating factor, if there ever was one.

A Tile Smashing Good Time

I made another trip down to smash up more salvaged tile today. I only a had a few hours, but I hit a vein of easily obtainable tiles, so I made a good haul. I may go down tomorrow one last time. We’ll see how I feel. I’ve been running crazy for the last week and a half. If it wasn’t the tile then it was the plumbing. I got a lot done but my house and my life is a chaotic mess because of it.

I’ve been able to get 15 boxes that are the same size, and then another 4 boxes of different sizes. I took one of the 15 boxes and counted 206 tiles in it. They are 2-inch hex tiles so I figured 36 tiles per sq ft. That works out to roughly 5.5 sq ft per box, times 15 boxes, means I have roughly 85 sq ft of tile. Of course, there will be some waste when I go to clean it, but I’ll assume the other 4 boxes of varying sizes will account for the waste.

I have about 70 sq ft of floor space to do. With a normal installation I would order an extra 5% to 10% to account for waste during installation. Considering the tile, I think this will be a worst case scenario when it comes to waste, so lets say I need 80 sq ft. As I estimated, I have 85 sq ft.

This all assumes I don’t do a boarder. If I do a 6-inch boarder of some other tile, then it puts me in a better position. I’m leaning away from a boarder now because the salvaged hex tile is half inch thick and the new tiles, or at least the samples I got, are only 3/16 of an inch thick. I would have to shim all of the boarder area by 5/16 of an inch. If I’m off a little bit it could look crappy.

In other news, I posted a question about cleaning grout off tile over at Urban Revivals on thier Discussion Blog. It’s not really a blog and it’s not really a forum. You ask a question using a web form and a few days later, if they answer, they post your question and an answer to their “blog”. Anyway, someone else asked the same question I did only a day before I did, so they posted their question and answer. The question was, how do you remove old grout from salvaged tile. The answer was a dermel Tool. Specifically, here was the Q&A….


Aggie of Chicago writes: How do you remove adhesive from used ceramic tile?

Urban Revivals replies: We use a dremel tool with stone grinder bits. Set the variable speed so you can grind it off the tile, without going so fast that you nick the tiles.

I think Stucco House also came up with this response, so she gets a gold star by her name. Of course, the best part of this is, it means I get to have hours and hours of fun grinding grout off tiles. I’m fortunate this is good grout grinding weather. I’ve been thinking about though, I really don’t have to get it all off. In most places the grout was only an eight of an inch think or less. In some of repaired areas it was thicker, but those make up a small minority of the tiles. All I have to do is take it down below the surface of the tile and when I regrout you’ll never see it. Either way, it’s going to be a butt-load of work. I just have to keep reminding myself that I’m saving seven or eight hundred dollars. That is a motivating factor, if there ever was one.

The Big Smack Method

I got another 5 boxes of tile today. I'm trying all kinds of things to get it up as best I can. The floor has moods and variations to it so there is no one way. If one method works well in one area then it doesn’t work at all in another. It can be frustrating.

The building is mostly deserted and I work alone. I don’t mind working alone, so it’s ok. The cold is a bit of a problem, though. The building is across the alley from the building that burned down last month. When that building burned down they shut off the gas to the whole block. Since the building I’m working in was empty at the time, no one bothered to relight the pilot light on the heater. Normally that wouldn’t be too bad here in Eureka but we’re smack-dab in the middle of a freakish cold spell. Over-night lows are in the 20’s and daytime temps stay in the high 30s to low 40s. So I’m in this building sitting on a tile floor and it’s just above freezing. Not an ideal circumstance.

The couple that owns the building also run a business 2 stores down. When I go down to work on the tile I first go to the business and get the key from the woman running the store. We haven’t talked much but today she seemed curious about why I was getting the tile. She asked me how I was getting it up and at one point she asked, “So do you score it with a knife between the tiles first?” Ding! The light bulb went off over my head.

As I said, I’ve been trying all kinds of things. This scoring method made it in to my bag of tricks, but doesn’t always work to keep the edges from chipping. Nothing works every time. Some methods are slower than others but the loss percentage seems to be the same no matter what I do, so I decided to get more aggressive.

There are some tools in the store. One of them is a 6 foot long pry bar. It weighs 10 or 15 pounds and has a ball handle at one end and then a flat, 2-inch wide pry bar at the other. It is heavy and very solid. I started using it with very good results today. I slide it back and forth along the floor and smack the leading edge of the tile field in several places along a 3 or 4 foot wide face. It demolishes the tiles it hits, but it loosens large sections from the floor. I then have to deal with separating the tiles from the grout. This is where the real loss occurs.

This Big Smack method has similar loss percentages as the other methods, but it works much faster. I able to free more tile quickly, and in a frigid room, that has become very important. I think I have 13 boxes now. I’m going to go back tomorrow and try and get another 5 or 6 boxes. I’m supposed to work on the plumbing on Sunday, and Monday I may not be able to get anything done anywhere. We’ll see how much more I can get.

More Tile Salvage

If you would have asked me yesterday I would have said I was done with tile salvage. It just seemed to be too far gone to save. Even if I could save some of it, I’m not sure I could get enough. Then there’s the whole labor aspect of it. The thing seems like it’s going to be very labor intensive.

Then I got a few comments from people who think it can be saved. I went back down there last night and my friend Chuck was pulling up the boarder. I think that boarder is too big for my small bathroom anyway, so I was not planning on using it. Besides, Chuck is the one who told me about the tile in the first place, so he has first dibs on it anyway.

Then at work today I started thinking that maybe it can be cleaned up and saved. I mean, what the hell do I know about cleaning old tile. So I figured I would get as much as I can now and worry about cleaning it later. I would never stop kicking myself if I figure out a way to clean and then found out it’s all in the dump.

I spent 2 or 3 hours down there today and got 5 boxes of tile. I was less selective than I was on Tuesday when I only got 3 boxes. There will be a lot of half pieces needed to fill in along the boarders. I settled on two methods for pulling up the tile. There is The Full Pop and The Single Pop method.

With the Full Pop I hammer two 5-five inch scrappers under the tile, spaced 6 or 8 inches apart. I then hammer pry bars under the scrappers and pop up a large section all at once. This is very destructive but it results in more than a dozen tiles coming up at one time. I’m lucky if half of them are salvageable.

With the Single Pop method I use a hammer and a half inch chisel to pop up a single tile at a time. This is more time consuming but I’m able to save more tile. The Single Pop method can only be used when at least 3 sides of the hex tile are exposed. Often times a Full Pop exposes a vein of 3 sided tiles. The two methods sort of work together.

So tomorrow I’ll go down again and maybe Saturday as well. I’ll just keep popping tile until I’m sick of it or feel I have enough, which ever comes first. While I was taking a break I found an old photograph in the building of when the place was a saloon. I photoed the photograph and took some shots of the room as it is today. The big chandelier is still there, and of course, the floor.

As I think I said the other day, the tile floor extends under the front façade of the building about 2-feet out on to the sidewalk in front of the building. It ends with a marble curb and there is some tile patterns along with the word “OBERON” written in tile right in front of the door. I assume the saloon was called The Oberon. Here’s some photos. It's looks like it would have been a nice place to have a beer. I was told yesterday that Jack London stopped in once.

MAJOR SCORE….almost

Four hundred square feet of 1902 encaustic tile free for the taking. A beautiful multicolored boarder with a field of 2-inch hex tiles. All free and ready for the taking. The only problem is, someone repaired the floor with a Portland cement base grout.

The 2-inch white encaustic hex tiles were made by Cambridge tile. These are the same people who made my 1895 fireplace tiles. The boarder was made by A.E.T. (American Encaustic Tile). I think both companies are (or were) located in Ohio.

There is a building in Old Town that was recently vacated by a kitchen wares business. The new owner thought the floor was too far gone for the upscale dinner house he wants to open. I had mentioned to some friends about my bathroom and ideas for tile. They told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on…..no, wait, that’s an old commercial. Anyway, anybody who has spoken to me the last two months knows I’m working on my bathroom and when word came that an old tile floor was going to be ripped out I got a call.

I had great hopes for this tile. The floor was in bad shape, there is no denying that. Still, there was plenty of good tile to be had. I only need 100 square feet, or less, for the bathroom and mud room. There should have been plenty.

In days of old, they laid tile floors in a mortar bed of a lime based cement. The lime cement is very forgiving. It holds the tile fine, but not to the point that the tile can never be recovered. The lime based mortar moves with the building as the building settles and ages. Portland cement based mortars are not forgiving at all. They will hold on to the tile until the end of time.

At some point, someone regrouted the floor with a Portland cement based grout. As I tried to pull up the tile it flaked and chipped at the edges when it tried to separate from the grout. This first picture is of the underside of the tile.



These two tiles had some writing in pencil on the bottom so I shoved them in my pocket. I didn’t clean them at all and that is pencil writing from 1902. The tile just lifts away from the old mortar bed with a little persuasion and is left in almost ready to use condition. The writing says “Seconds Della” on one and “Seconds {unknown}” on the other. I think the Seconds refers to the quality. I acquired a single 1902 subway tile from the Vance Hotel, also in Old Town, and it is stamped “Second” on the back. I think because of the cost of shipping from the east coast (all the way around So. America) second quality was cheaper and so that’s what we ended up with.





Anyway, above is a shot of the A.E.T. boarder with the Cambridge Field. Notice the narrow grout lines and notice the dark color of the grout. This is not original. That black grout is the Portland cement based grout that was added later.



Here you can see the side of the tile. There is the black grout on top and then the lime mortar on bottom. The lime mortar cleans up easily. The black grout chips the edges of the tile when its removed. And removing it is not easy at all. It’s really too bad. Encaustic tiles costs big bucks today. If that stuff could be salvaged it would go for upwards of $20 a sq ft. Encaustic tile is the same all the way through. It’s like the linoleum of tiles.

Of course, it's possible that the Portland cement based grout is original, but I don’t think so. In some places there were major repairs made to the floor - apparently this place was a saloon for many decades - when the repairs where made and the tiles were re-laid they use a Portland cement based mortar to relay the tiles. Those tiles disintegrated when I tried to remove them. In some cases they couldn't get the tiles to all fit back the way they came out and they used nippers to reshape the tiles. Then they filled in with this black grout. It was under the tiles in places, like they "back-buttered" the reshaped tiles before putting them in.