About Old Farm Reclaimed Lumber

Learn More about us by reading the article from Out ‘N About – March 2012.

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Johnson City, TN. — You can say Mike Snapp has found his nitch. And, what an interest story his nitch has become.

“Back in the mid-1970s my dad, P.C. Snapp, and I got 1,000 board feet of wormy chestnut out of an old barn down in Caney Valley in Hawk­ins County with the help of my uncle Mike Grindstaff and friend Henry Derrick,” Snapp remembers fondly. “Dad and I made picture frames, clocks, post office door banks and bookcases for people and we never charged a cent. They were gifts. That 1,000 board feet lasted us almost 30 years,” he said with a laugh.

When he ran out of lumber Snapp went to look for more. “I found a barn that had a mix of wormy chestnut, oak, pine and popular,” he remembers. “I kept the chestnut and found uses for the other species through area connections. With the help of Brent Buchanan we took down 74 barns in two-and-a half years. The experts say if you reuse the lumber in an old barn you have [just] saved 300 trees. You do the math!”

Snapp and his crew’s handy work and craftsmanship has resulted in him making items ranging from fine end grain cutting boards, pizza peels, table tops., island tops, lazy Susan’s, and special orders from local restaurants. Some of his work is laced with exotic lumbers from around the world.

His fine kitchen and food related items can be found locally at the Stockpot and Honey Baked Ham in Johnson City and Corner Nest Antique Mall in Elizabethton or you can shop him on EBay.

Ryan Barker sands a special order for a local restaurant.

“Our rustic pieces are reclaimed flooring, bookcases, picture frames, gun racks, lazy Susan’s, harvest tables, clocks, banks, jewelry boxes and custom orders,” Mike adds. “Over the years we have concentrated on ‘rustic’ items for the home and fine cutting boards for the kitchen.”

Mike said his crews were going out and reclaiming the siding and timbers off old pre-1940s barns that were either getting ready to fall or barns that were in the way of urban sprawl. “We would try to get to them before the bulldozers did,” he said.

The barns Snapp and his crew retrieved were dismantled, de-nailed and the lumber was saved to make useful items or crafts giving those items another 100 years of life.

“Because of the current economic cli­mate, it is making it harder to get afford­able reclaimed lum­ber,” Snapp explained. “This has caused us to look at more than just the old barns that were being destroyed by urban sprawl. We are now looking at the sur­rounding timber that is being cut down and we are trying to give it a new life as well.”

Article from the Out ‘N About – March 2012, page 37.

Mike Snapp Displays some of his cutting boards sitting in a porch recliner he refurbished using reclaimed lumber.
Reclaimed flooring in Mike's house
A beautiful bar area constructed from reclaimed barn wood