Vintage Wood vs. Reclaimed Wood

September 23rd, 2009 by jennifermyers

Vintage Wood's products in use

It’s been all about Colorado for Kari Seydewitz, LRM Interior Design’s in-house designer. Last week it was the beautiful copper screens for the outdoors, and this week she’s found aged wood from Vintage Woods. This Vail Valley, Colorado company takes beetle-kill wood and ages it to create amazing and unique wood products.

What is “beetle-kill wood,” you ask? We didn’t know either. It seems that all over Colorado, pine beetles are burrowing into the trees to lay their eggs. Most of the time, healthy trees expel most of the beetles with their sap, and the tree lives. If a tree has been weakened by drought or if the trees are overcrowded, they aren’t able to repel the beetle, and the tree dies. This always happens in cycles every few years, but recently it has been particularly bad in Colorado due to forests weakened from drought and 100 years of wildfire supression. Sometimes the beetles leave behind a fungus, and as the tree dies, the fungus stains the wood all sorts of colors, from shades of gray, blue, purple, brown and black.Thankfully, something good can come from the death of these trees. Vintage Woods buys this wood from small, local Colorado sawmills to create products that can be customized for a variety of projects. “Using beetle-kill wood on your next project is a cost-effective way to turn this environmental negative into a positive,” says Vintage Woods.

Kari likes the fact that Vintage Woods’ products are easier to install than reclaimed wood because the boards are straight-edged and all the same widths and thicknesses. “This means there’s a cost savings to our clients,” says Kari.

Vintage Woods products come in four finishes: Barn Red, Brown, Grey and Dark Grey. All look beautifully weathered, yet are sealed with a low- or no-VOC product on all sides. Vintage Woods’ clients have used their products for many aspects of projects, including: exterior siding; interior and exterior beams, trusses, ceilings and trim; doors and paneling; wine cellars; garage doors; furniture; and architectural wood elements.