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Recycling from a church

AJB Temple

AJB Temple

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A local church in Yalding has just removed a dozen pews and about 40 square metres of pitch pine flooring and circa 30 metres of 4" by 4" oak edging all dating back to Victorian times.

The local church warden who is a very sweet man in his 80s offered the pews locally for £75 each donation to church funds. When we went to choose our pew, I asked him what they are doing with the flooring. To which the answer was they have rented a skip. I said I would make another donation for the whole lot. He wanted £50 so we agreed on that. One pew that someone else chose unfortunately fell apart so they don't want it now and that was brought to us as well. I will be making it into a shorter one. Both had cushions and we were given those as well.

The builders (approved for ecclesiastical work) did a super job of getting the whole lot up intact and the husband of the doctor just delivered it in his son's (who has a woodmill that I had no idea was there) van. The planks have a rough side and a smooth side are an inch and a quarter thick. All but one came up intact. One of them split a bit but will glue up. The pictures are of the area where they were removed. There is evidence of a foundation wall that no one knew had been there. And what I thought was really interesting is that the area beneath both ends of the board supporting rafters was filled with old bits of broken pre-victorian gravestones.

IMG_7201.JPGIMG_7204.JPG
 
Yes, it's going into the unfinished master bedroom. Slightly creepy that it has been in a church. There are a lot of nail holes and my plan is to use rose head nails.
 
Some Pitch Pine that old can be very brittle and the splinters are wicked, causing localised sepsis. I took some flooring from an 1896 building and wished I had butchers' armoured gloves in the end.
 
I always wear gloves Sam anyway as I am allergic to wood tar. This lot will be fine. Like a lot of churches, the floor beneath the a foot or more air gap was earth. It's a high water table as the church is about 50 yards from the river flowing through Yalding. The wood is dry but not knackered at all. They would never have been able to lever the 6m boards up otherwise.

Anyway, it's all upstairs now acclimatising to the room.

They also have a pair of huge heavy arched doors that will go in the skip unless someone can take them. They are about 4 metres tall and I am tempted to find some way to use them somewhere.
 
Nice score; loverly stuff but in my very limited experience, the stuff's full of resin that gums up saw and planer blades. Difficult to glue as well if I recollect - Rob
 
I don't think I will be doing any planing of it. It will all be cut up in the room where it will be used, and sanded in situ. With floorboards glueing a couple of splits wont matter as the boards will be tightly butted if I do the job well.

Right next to the area where these boards came from, the church recently had to retile the Victorian floor as they altered the lobby and put in a lot of new panelling in Ash. They found four headless skeletons under the tiles. Apparently dating back to the middle ages. The church has clearly been enlarged a lot and altered over the years. Most of the outer 7 or 8 metres of the building just has bare earth beneath raftered and floor boarded sections.

The new floor is going to have insulation underneath. They will be using shredded cork rather than a man made material.
 
Cabinetman said:
That Pine will be really good, I’ve had some old Pitch Pine in the past and wished I’d had a lot more, very nice to work and smells wonderful.
Ian
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Yes. I had a couple of pieces, a door lining from a lunatic asylum. 12" x 2".
I have a few pieces, cut from pit props from South Crofty mine - I don't think i'll get a huge amount from them but loads of pen blanks with provenance.
 
Let's be positive Rob! £50 for 40 square meters of pitch pine laid in 1880, plus quite a bit of oak delivered free in exchange for some coffee, is in the gift horse mouth category. It will be fine. Sandpaper disks are cheap.
 
I rescued some pitch pine parquet from my old edwardian school that was getting demolished. I found it lovely stuff to process. Instead of chipping the bitumen off I sawed it off, then dimensioned every block on my little titan thicknesser. It went down in my hallway so nicely, I barely needed to sand it.
I think the wadkin flooring I put in my workshop is pitch also
 
Back in the 80s we bought floors from the distilleries at Port Dundas in Glasgow (a deal involving a sharp suited man and a carpet bag full of cash in the boot of a porshe). We ended up with 44' long pitch pine joists that were 15" x 3". Two 40' trailer loads as well as the T&G flooring which was douglas fir and around 6 1/2" x 2". Kept us and most of the local joinery firms that bought into it going for years.

Those joists were behemoths and a adventure to cut.
 
It's great that some of us recycle stuff. I've made an offer on the doors as I can't watch them go into a skip. I am very tempted (my wife is unaware of this :cool:) to create a huge arched entrance into our inner hall. Might get told off for that.
 
A.I.
"The biggest recorded pitch pine timbers used as stulls in a Cornish mine were at Dolcoath Mine, where pieces were 18 to 20 inches square and 30 to 33 feet long, supporting vast amounts of waste rock. Some imported timbers reached 24 inches square and 84 feet long, needed for the immense cavernous stopes created after ore extraction."

These were placed two feet apart, with six hundred feet of broken rock above them.

By the bye, I remember being shown a timber merchant's catalogue (Liverpool, iirc) in the late '60s that listed greenheart eighty feet x two foot six x two foot six.
 
AJB Temple said:
It's great that some of us recycle stuff. I've made an offer on the doors as I can't watch them go into a skip. I am very tempted (my wife is unaware of this :cool:) to create a huge arched entrance into our inner hall. Might get told off for that.
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Oh please may you be able to pull that one off🤞
 
AJB Temple said:
Let's be positive Rob! £50 for 40 square meters of pitch pine laid in 1880, plus quite a bit of oak delivered free in exchange for some coffee, is in the gift horse mouth category. It will be fine. Sandpaper disks are cheap.
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Agreed; gift horse territory! Should look really good once laid but unless we get some gratuitous piccies, we'll never know...... :ROFLMAO: - Rob
 
My wife does not like me posting pics from inside the house. I'll see what she says. She wants me to build a raised plinth for the four poster which is what the oak edgings will be used for I expect. The whole room and en suite is getting major work this winter. my main issue is getting a disused log burner flue out as I can't get to that bit of roof very easily.
 
AndyP said:
Oh please may you be able to pull that one off🤞
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Sadly I decided against the doors. I had various ideas, including a table, but I put the church in touch with a reclamation yard and they have now been sold. Total bargain at £150 - the door furniture alone is worth that. But the market is limited and there is urgency to get them off site. Three large slabs of York Stone also went for £100.

As a consolation bonus though I have been given 20 four and six metre planks of kiln dried dead straight Ash that are surplus to requirements for bell tower repairs. I'll be making a donation obviously. The church hates storing things as it creates a safety and insurance issue apparently.
 
:D. I don't go to church Mark. Except for weddings, christenings and funerals. Or when I am paid to play the organ :cool:. However, I have a wife who promotes our restaurant on social media and groups and Next Door and FB and Linked In and Insta everywhere locally, so she is fully plugged in to every village in at least a ten mile or fifteen mile radius. If there is something good on offer she knows about it immediately. Zero credit to me. But I would say that being friendly and helpful goes a long way to getting good deals. She's super user friendly!
 
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