Old school style: Now you can own part of your alma mater

If you can get to a salvage store just after its employees have scoured one of Seattle's historic schools, you could come out with 1920s light fixtures, old-growth fir boards or cabinet doors with a patina perfected over 80 years.

Local businesses, including Second Use and The RE Store, salvage and sell such gems from schools undergoing renovation, pulling out items from another era. They strip the insides of floorboards, bleachers and even scoreboards.

They recently salvaged Beacon Hill's Grover Cleveland High School, which was designed by Floyd Naramore and built in the mid-1920s.

Not much had changed inside.

"You're buying something that's really kind of a piece of history," said Michael Armstrong, co-owner of Second Use. "A lot of the stuff (wood) was milled in the Northwest. It's local history vs. going with some kind of birch or hemlock at Home Depot that comes from who knows where that's second or third or fourth growth."

Bringing in salvage companies works for the school districts, too, which in the past have paid to have the interiors hauled away, said Pat Finn, Seattle field manager for The RE Store, a nonprofit store with locations in Seattle and Bellingham. Salvaging also keeps the material out of landfills, instead finding new life in homes and businesses.

The RE Store has salvaged eight or nine Western Washington schools this year, Finn said.

"When the schools are being remodeled in the summer, we always try to get in and salvage as much as we can," he said. The school district saves some items it can reuse, "but if a salvage company doesn't salvage it, it gets demolished or thrown away."

Then there's the stuff emerging from the double doors, which is of a quality and craftsmanship difficult to find nowadays.

"At the time, people took a tremendous amount of pride in their schools, and education was really looked up to," Armstrong said. "The buildings reflected that, and they didn't scrimp on quality."

People remodeling homes from an era like the 1920s often want light fixtures from that period, or old-growth vertical-grain flooring.

Cleveland's cabinetry was especially well-preserved, Armstrong said. The cabinets were unfinished and over the years acquired a beautiful sheen.

Certain items, like the vertical-grain fir boards and slate chalkboards (popular for kitchen counters), sold quickly, but there are still lockers, sleek auditorium seats and bathroom mirrors. A heavy, three-window paneled door sells for a couple hundred dollars at Second Use but probably would cost thousands to build new, Armstrong said.

"These school cabinets have been slammed tens of thousands of times, kicked, bumped, gouged, etc., and still they hold up," he said. "These things are going to hold up for many more decades to come with a reasonable amount of care."

Nicole Tsong: 206-464-2150 or ntsong@seattletimes.com