Making the best use of the past

Stan Williamson is a former cattle rancher who still wears a whiteÊ cowboy hat Ñ so he must be a good guy. Photo by Susan Shinn, for the Salisbury Post.

Enchanting birdhouses are but one item Stan Williamson creates out ofÊ salvaged wood. Photo by Susan Shinn, for the Salisbury Post.

Staircase spindles have become candleholders. Photo by Susan Shinn, for the Salisbury Post.

Salvaged wood waits behind the store, waiting to be given a new life. Photo by Susan Shinn, for the Salisbury Post.

Williamson made the greenhouse behind Okey Dokey out of salvagedÊ windows. Photo by Susan Shinn, for the Salisbury Post.

Farm tables are one of Williamson's most popular items. Photo by Susan Shinn, for the Salisbury Post.

Williamson's handiwork Ñ including a shadowbox, toy chest andÊ bookcase Ñ is on display at Okey Dokey. Photo by Susan Shinn, for the Salisbury Post.

Williamson contemplates his next project. Photo by Susan Shinn, for the Salisbury Post.

A former cattle rancher, Williamson put his personal brand on thisÊ farm table, a popular choice for his customers in Texas. Photo by Susan Shinn, for the Salisbury Post.

By Susan Shinn

For The Salisbury Post

When the Friendly Cue closed down a few years ago, Stan Williamson stepped in to do some salvaging.

“We got all the wood,” says Williamson, a former cattle rancher whose business partner is Bette Pollock of Okey Dokey and Co. General Store. “All the old stuff is good stuff.”

He’d never attempted making furniture before.

“I’m not a carpenter,” Williamson admits. “I’ve been a cowboy all my life.”

He still wears blue jeans, cowboy boots and a white hat — so he must be a good guy.

After a few years, he’s surely a carpenter now, working with a crew of three. They’ve got more work than they can handle, Williamson says, between customers all over North Carolina and his home state of Texas.

“It’s fun,” says Williamson, 50. “We didn’t have a plan. We didn’t know what in the hell we were doing.”

About the time the pool hall was dismantled, Williamson tore down his first house. The way he describes the process makes it sound easy.

“We remove all the beadboard,” he says. “We knock out what boards we can. We go to the roof and take the tin off, then we come down piece by piece ’til we get to the bottom.”

Perhaps you’d be surprised at the things Williamson and his crew have built.

Shutters become the sides of bookcases. Wide planks are transformed into farm tables. Glass doors get new life as entertainment centers.

Windows turn into shadow boxes. Staircase spindles become candleholders.

Leftover beadboard is in the process of being made into a stand for a sink, a cabinet beneath it. Some wood trim was put on it, but Williamson doesn’t like it. He’s gonna switch it out with old wood.

He sells at least 20 kitchen islands a month — and that many bookcases, too. He makes church benches. He makes chairs. He’s fashioned some beautiful birdhouses.

“Once you start doing something,” he explains, “you find more ways to do stuff.”

He’s even put his own personal brand on a farm table — a “W” adorned with three boots. That detail is especially popular in Texas, with customers’ own brands. He mostly works with heart pine.

“This is some good stuff,” he says, rubbing his hand over a tabletop.

“If people take a vacation, they go shopping or do fun things,” Pollock says. “We go out looking for doors.”

But that’s fun, too, she admits. “It’s a treasure hunt.”

Pollock has been known to paint signs on some scraps.

A recent favorite saying: “Gone crazy. Back soon.”

Out back is a 12-foot by 20-foot greenhouse, probably more than 9 feet high on the sides, built from salvaged windows. There’s a bunch of salvaged materials here, just waiting to be given new life.

Williamson’s shop is in the basement.

“Not one thing goes to waste,” Williamson says proudly. He gestures to five garbage cans of scrap wood, the result of several days’ work.

The scraps will be used by someone who has a wood-burning stove.

There’s a saying that a tree is never dead if you make something out of it.

Williamson would agree.

“People like what we do,” he says. “They bring us stuff from all over North Carolina.”

It’s not unusual for Williamson to come to work in the morning — he usually shows up around 6:30 — and find piles of salvaged wood with a note pinned on them: “Enjoy.”

When he tears down a house, he’ll usually make the donors a piece of furniture.

“It’s just a mannerly thing to do, I think,” he says. “I’m not greedy. I just try to get along.”

Williamson gets most of his work by word-of-mouth.

“People say, ‘There’s an idiot in town who will tear down a house for free,’ ” he says, a grin creeping from beneath his bushy white mustache.

“When we leave a site, it’s clean. We don’t leave a mess.”

Williamson splits his time between Salisbury and Canton, Texas, where he and Pollock have a shop.

Once a month, he makes deliveries there.

“We take orders here, we take them there,” he says.

When he returns to Salisbury, he says, “depends on how much I want to drag my feet getting back.”

Personally, Williamson would prefer to paint the wood, but he leaves about 90 percent of his products in their natural state — distressed and weathered.

Customers love it, he says. “Why they like it, I don’t know. But they do.”

His customers, he says, prefer the “shabby chic” look (he pronounces it “chick”). “They eat it up.”

If wood is painted, Pollock picks out the colors.

“I’m not a decorator,” Williamson says.

Customers can bring in their own designs and their own wood. He can make pretty much whatever they want. His work is a lot less expensive than new furniture. He doesn’t have to buy materials, which helps a lot.

Frank Gregory of Boone, who has relatives in Salisbury, stopped in the shop one day and liked what he saw. He’s bought a farm table with two benches, a counter he uses as a bar, window boxes and candleholders.

“It’s rustic,” says Gregory, who has a four-bedroom farmhouse on 110 acres. “It just has a nice, lived-in look. It’s the look I was going for. He does a great job. I go in there every time I’m in town. There’s always something different, something original, and I like that.”

Out back, Williamson surveys a pile of wood, waiting to be transformed into something useful.

“You can’t go to Lowe’s and find that, pulling out a thick, square plank he estimates is 100 years old, easy.

“That was done by an ax,” he says, pointing to the marks along the wood. “You cannot find that anywhere.”

For more information about Stan Williamson’s furniture, call him at 704-798-8943. He does not disassemble brick houses.

Freelance writer Susan Shinn lives in Salisbury.