It all started when I saw a posting on kijiji for some “old gymnasium maple flooring”. The ad claimed the wood would be for sale at a community garage sale in Rockyford Alberta. Jeff, Trotsky, and I hopped in the truck and set out with our fingers crossed (in Trotsky's case, paws, not fingers).
We didn't have an address for the house selling the flooring so when we arrived in the small town we asked the first person we saw if they knew where the garage sale was. The friendly stranger informed us that the garage sale was taking place at most of the houses in the town and kindly handed us a map of the participating houses.
The town is essentially one or two loops so we chose a direction and started hitting up the sales inquiring at each house whether or not they were the seller of the coveted gym floor.
Each of the participating houses had a “Garage Sale” sign taped up in the front yard. We turned a corner to see a sign on an old telephone post indicating that there was a sale in a campsite.
We pulled up to an old camper with records, bikes, old rv parts and many other items strewn around it. A topless, older fellow appeared to say hello.
Just before we had hit the road for Rockyford we had been at Hobo Camper Country looking at the price of portable water tanks, turns out they are freaking expensive. Because we had just that very day been looking at these items I was able to recognize a portable water tank in all it's glory propped up with a $50.00 sticker on it.
We handed the man fiddy bones, chucked the thing in the back of the truck, and headed off to find the flooring. Majority of the town was involved in this community sale, but since the town was so small that meant there were about 10 garage sales. We found our flooring at number 8.
We were led to an unfinished basement where we passed a room full of flooring that had not been de-nailed, and then at the end of the hall there was an entire room of flooring that already had the nails removed. We were left to sift through what we wanted.
The owner gave us a fixed price to fit as much as we could into our truck, a task that took hours. We drove home in the setting sun, grinning like bandits pleased with their haul. | Turns out cleaning 50 years worth of dirt, blood, sweat, tears, and floor wax out of gymnasium tongue and grooves is time consuming and hard. We were so happy when this was over and we were ready to install the loft floor. We are super pleased with the final product! |
We ended up having lots of the flooring left over. I posted an ad to sell it on kijiji and was promptly contacted by an elementary school teacher who told us she is a great supporter of the Tiny House movement and even has her students do a project where they design and construct tiny house models!