Ready for the dump? Of course not! We transformed this piece of scrap into a hostess stand for new restaurant opening up. Unfortunately I don’t have an image of the final piece but it only took some drilling, grinding, and power washing to give it a second life.
This was one of the best dirty fun I’ve had yet! Housewerks has been inviting me to tag along on one of their salvage runs to an old electrical armature building located near Fells Point in Baltimore. The building had not been entered in over 35 years and still contained all the tools that were originally in it. Just imagine loads of steel industrial legs, spools, wooden boxes, and grooved wheels among tons of other things. It was an industrial salvage re-purposer’s dream!
Crazily, someone in a past life put carpet over these beautiful marble slabs. We were asked to clean them up and cut them to size for a new Whole Foods store opening in Connecticut.
This semester I’m working at Housewerks, an architectural salvage company that also has a workshop that does restoration and re-purposing. Ben and Trevor, the two guys who run the workshop portion are encyclopedias full of rich information.
The pictures above are from one of my first projects - re-purposing this metal cart for a client. We cut off the L- shaped metal rod using the angle iron, removed the flanges by drilling through the screws (this tends to be quicker than trying to pry old screws loose), and sanded down some of the rust to make the names on the wheels ‘pop’ more. Lastly, we put a coat of polythene on it to polish it off.
