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Who Knew You Could Fish For Trees?
Hardwood floors are durable, versatile, easy to care for and beautiful.  It's no wonder that more and more homeowners are choosing to install them each year.  If you are considering installing wood floors, reclaimed wood floors are a wonderful earth-friendly option.  Not only are these antique wood floors loved for their durability and beauty, they are also revered for their rich history.  

Antique wood floors are usually made from wood that has been reclaimed from old buildings or structures; however there is another interesting source for reclaimed heart cypress and heart pine - rivers.  That's right, southern river beds are one of the best sources for recovering old logs abandoned between 200 and 500 years ago.  

What Makes It Green?
Timber operations in the 1800s used the rivers to raft their logs to nearby sawmills.  Some of the logs that fell off the rafts drifted down river, but the hardest and densest logs sank.  They have been preserved underwater until state-licensed crews began to pull them up a few years ago.  Once on dry land, the trees are kiln-dried so when cut into planks they can easily acclimate to the installation site.  The cypress and pine planks are 100% heart wood and have very few knots and blemishes (unlike wood planks reclaimed from old buildings).  

According to the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), more than 6 billion people rely on trees and plants for some aspect of their lives, putting huge pressures on the world's forests.  Buying reclaimed wood for your hardwood floors helps to take some of that pressure off the forests - including the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) approved ones.

What You Can Do

Where there was once approximately 90 million acres, less than 10,000 acres of old-growth heart pine remain today.

We have river-reclaimed heart pine floors from the Goodwin Heart Pine Company.  Not only do we think they're stunning and we get compliments from others all the time.  They have 20 products of all price ranges - check them out www.heartpine.com.