One day he went to his supplier and asked, “Why don’t we go and take down the barns ourselves?” Horvath recalls. The supplier wasn’t interested, and, after Horvath asked a second time, told him if he wanted to take down barns, then he should do it himself. Horvath was hurt, he says, but undeterred. Horvath asked his wife, Lisa, whether they should start their own reclaimed wood company. “She thought about it and said, ‘I don’t want to be 80 and regret that we didn’t, so let’s do it.'”
Shortly after that conversation, they dug into their life savings and in 2011 founded a company without a single piece of wood in inventory and not one piece of equipment, Horvath says. They had a 17,000-square-foot warehouse with a 2-acre yard and no jobs. But they had a name, Real Antique Wood, and a mission: to salvage, mill, sell and install wood products with a story.
The business took off, and today the company’s empty lot is filled with wood from 20 barns that were salvaged from across the country.
A good story imbues the wood with an energy that people can pick up on and react to, Horvath says. If social media is any indication, that energy can even be felt through a photograph. On March 4, at the end of her first day with Real Antique Wood as brand manager, Megan Curley uploaded a project picture to Facebook. The picture was of Horvath’s live-edge black walnut slab installation in the hallway and stairwell of a home in New Jersey.
The next morning, at 5:30 a.m., the picture had received 10,500 views overnight. It went crazy from then on, Horvath says, amassing 1.95 million views, 123,648 “likes” and 22,330 shares over the next two weeks.
The wood from the viral sensation came from a tree in Somerset County, N.J., that was damaged during Hurricane Irene in 2011—just one minor victim among a hurricane that caused $1 billion of damage to the state and left seven people dead. The tree measured approximately 24 inches in diameter at its base and 30 feet in length. It was kiln-dried and stacked between the wall and the couch in the Horvath’s family room, where it sat for three years. “It moved us 3 feet closer to the TV,” Horvath says.
Then Horvath’s neighbor, a previous customer, asked if he could have the wood for a floor in his front hallway. He was going over the project with Horvath and his wife, Lisa, when he said to them, “Well, what about the stairwell?” Without missing a beat, Lisa said they would put the black walnut slabs up the stairs. They shook hands, but Horvath was uneasy.
“I said to myself, I don’t think I know how to do this,” Horvath says, laughing. “[Lisa], what are you throwing me under the bus for, I don’t know how to do that.” But with the help of Real Antique Wood’s carpenter, Anthony Saraceno, they figured it out.
Horvath and Saraceno started by gluing two slabs of the live-edge walnut end-to-end on top of 3⁄4-inch plywood down the hallway. The rest of the floor slabs were then laid down. When the bark from one slab didn’t sit flush with the bark of its neighbor, Horvath filled the gap using a mixture of wood flour and walnut bark crumbled with a cheese grater.
For the stairs, Horvath and Saraceno first installed the oak stair treads. Then they overlaid a slab onto each stair tread, scribed its shape and, using a jigsaw, cut and removed the middle of each tread. Then the slabs were fit into place. Gaps between the bark and the oak tread were filled using the grated bark and wood flour mixture, like the floor. Each slab was sized so that an inch would stick out beyond the edge of the tread. The extra inch was cut off, flipped underneath and carved round.
The finished project looked like black walnut trees had fallen on the stairs and in the hallway. With the floor done, Saraceno’s brother Chris pointed his camera at the installation and snapped the photograph that accompanied Real Antique Wood’s application for Wood Floor of the Year contest.
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