In downtown South Bend.

A salvage shop overflows with doors, windows, trim and all kinds of historic goods.

Four years ago, when we first started, it was kind of a longshot.

If a salvage job would actually work and be well received by the community.

You know, we don't you don't really know until you do it.

And so far, it's been very exciting to see the community kind of come together and support that we exist.

Salvage historically, has been kind of a dirty word in the preservation world because of the premise that you're taking from a historic building.

What should be a part of that building?

And our argument is that if the building's being demolished and you can't save it, it's beyond saving.

It's better to save the parts than the sum of the whole.

And the parts then can be reused for other historic buildings in a more appropriate way for those buildings.

When you're working on a historic building, sometimes you need to part, and you can't find it through the local lumber yard or even small local hardware store.

They just don't have it.

And so salvage plays a key role in providing materials that otherwise aren't available to match things in your house that you're restoring, that maybe you've lost a door, or you're looking for a sink to make a work, or whatever aspect you're you're trying to do on your restoration.

So the salvage shop fills that niche where we can sustainably save materials that otherwise would be lost, provide materials for historic buildings that would help some match because you're just frustrated.

You can't match it.

Then also provides opportunities in doing the salvage work to teach people how to fix their houses.

And we've had people come from Michigan City, Indy, further up in Michigan, some people occasionally from Illinois, that will come for very specific things.

Volunteers help keep the shop organized and ready for customers, including a recent group from the Notre Dame family camp.

So this volunteer set came.

This is the second Monday they were here.

They came two weeks in a row and helped us process doors, process trim.

De nailing trim is a big thing that we need.

And then also just organizing the shop better so that it's easier and less overwhelming when patrons come in.

Sometimes you get more salvage in.

You can process.

And so it was a great way to catch up and clean up the shop.

Get some things organized.

And Northam Alumni Association family camp are always great folks.

They come from all over the country beyond the shop's walls.

Trade work also teaches people the value of traditional craftsmanship is you can train someone to reglaze a historic wood window, That window will last another 50 years versus if you replace it with a modern vinyl window that window might last 20-25 before you have to replace it.

And in the interim of that time period, you can repair a wood window indefinitely until it's, you know, if you continually maintain it, you can repair it indefinitely.

Plastic windows or even clad wood windows or modern wood windows are really hard to repair because they're the way that they're built is just not.

It doesn't lend itself as easily to continual maintenance.

The best way to figure out how to fix old House is to take one apart.

Because when you figure out how to take it apart, you can actually put it back together.

So there's some training opportunities in that that we see moving forward, not just for, you know, board members or volunteers, but others that want to learn how to do that.

If you come in and look at a piece of trim that we have here and you can buy it, compare the graining in it and you take that same piece of trim and you run out to a big box store.

You're going to notice a drastic difference in how tight the graining is.

The quality of that wood is superior to what you can buy today at a at a big box store.

At the time that most materials were made pre-war, World War II, it was things were produced in a way that was very trades oriented, and they were crafted by hand in most cases.

So there's a lot more of that intangible value through having been made by hand, that you can't just get in a modern, mass produced material.

Things that are handmade, that are had kind of a a connection to the past that you can't really get with modern construction.

It all began as a small group of neighbors and a shared passion of preserving historic buildings.

South Bend Tree work started out as an informal, loosely knitted group of folks, who like to get a get together and, have some model beverages and, and complain about the inability to find contractors to work on their old houses, or stuff to fix them.

And over time, we just decided that rather than just drinking beer and complaining, we should do something about it.

We met for probably about a year, trying to decide what the best route was to rectify this deficiency in our local community that we saw, and ultimately decided that the best path forward was to organize a salvage shop where we could collect historic materials that were.

With that, we kept seeing repeatedly thrown into landfills.

So salvaged materials save them from landfills or being thrown away that we thought still had use, you know, that sort of organic growth of trade works has been the fun story, I think, about this organization because the individuals who are doing projects around town realized the need and eventually just felt that, yeah, there was a turning point when we decided nobody else is going to do this.

And if we want to continue to to have people that can do work, we need to step up and form a group.

You know, sitting in this location now surrounded by stuff the people can come in and buy to restore their building is hugely fulfilling.