For many years people have been recycling wood from old barns and using it in new homes. That happened all the time while I was living in New England, and also in Tennessee.
After moving to Florida, I was enchanted by the Heart Pine floors in many homes built in the 10s and 20s. In my son's home, 90 years had turned the floors to nearly black, a dull black. Rusty sanded the floors and resealed them, to a honey glow. When the sun heads down in late afternoon, and comes through the dining room window, the floor just glows. You can no longer harvest these trees, so the only source is used wood - or trees or logs that sank at the bottom of rivers and has been salvaged.
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune this morning has a long article on recycling teak. Most of this is from Thailand but is often warehoused here. There are of course plusses and minuses to this, and Indonesia is concerned at losing their heritage to the US, but it's yet another reuse of wood so that we are not chopping down more trees. There's also a patina to old wood, as to most old things (yes, incuding people), and a sense of history.
