That’s Jim Mason, recalling the moment in 2009 that led him to found Michigan Reclaimed Barns & Lumber. At the time he was forty-five and had been working on construction sites since he was seven years old.

“After World War II, my dad returned home [to Cleveland] and started working in construction and remodeling,” he explains. He was the “lucky” number thirteen of sixteen children, and “my older brothers were in business with Dad. I followed my brother Pat around like a puppy dog.

“I enjoyed the semi loads of wood going to suppliers,” Mason says, “but the personal touch when you put something in somebody’s house­—you feel honored.” | Photo: Mark Bialek

“He was working on a garage roof, and I was begging to go to work with him. I offered to work for twenty-five cents an hour and came down to a nickel an hour. He shook his head and said, ‘Jim, I want to, but I just can’t.’ I said okay and that I’d work for free.

“He had me sit on the roof with him with a bundle of shingles. I’d slide the shingles down to him as he was roofing the roof. From then on, I did everything my brothers did. We’re all pretty good craftsmen; we make things. It’s what we do.”

After graduating from Michigan State with a bachelor’s in communications and advertising, Mason began working in marketing and advertising, selling ad space for various publications, including Hometown Newspapers and the Detroit News. He began publishing a business journal and opened a small advertising agency, earning his MBA at EMU along the way. But he continued helping his family with framing houses, and his brothers worked alongside him when he and his wife built the custom home in Brighton where they would raise four children.

After decades in publishing and advertising, Mason says, “I was tired … just tired of chasing nickels, dimes, quarters, and dollars.” Eventually, he returned to estimating, demolitions, and working on commercial projects for a construction company. After the owner shut down the business, he and a few partners opened their own.

At a worksite in 2009, Mason says, “An old farmer from the west side of the state kept bugging and bugging me to take his barn down. I told him that we weren’t set up for that kind of work. So he started stopping by, bringing me coffee and donuts, and I agreed to take a look at his barn and said I’d take it down.

“We had Dumpsters and a big mechanical excavator on the property,” he says, when he realized he couldn’t bear to see the barnwood go to a landfill—some was of excellent quality, perfect for repurposing.

He took pictures and sent them to his brothers, saying, “I can’t destroy this … some of this stuff is incredible.” After his brothers agreed, he hauled the wood to his backyard.

“It was initially about selling a semi load of wood to somebody who would process it and do something with it,” he says. “That was the amount of wood a guy up in Wisconsin was willing to buy from me.”

But occasionally, he’d “run into a customer that was buying wood for any number of reasons—you know, an accent wall, or a sliding door or countertop—and they couldn’t find somebody that would want to work with the wood.” So he expanded into working with the company’s reclaimed wood himself.

“Woodworking machines are expensive. When you get into reclaim, some nails and things like that can be dangerous, and they can mess up a $100,000 machine,” he says. “But we’re dealing with it daily, and it’s a cost of doing business.

“I enjoyed the semi loads of wood going to suppliers, but the personal touch when you put something in somebody’s house—you feel honored. It’s the fun side of the business. I enjoy seeing what people can and cannot do with wood … Little by little it developed into a side business that turned into a real business, and now it’s legit, and here I am.”

His son Nicholas now handles the demolitions, using contract labor to take down forty to fifty barns and other buildings annually. Mason works with customers, mostly by appointment through their website, michiganreclaimedbarns.com, in their warehouse on Metty Dr. They have another warehouse in Medina, Ohio and operate three sawmills in Whitmore Lake, and Mason has a 3,000-square-foot personal workshop equipped with contemporary and vintage machines.

Their signature pieces are custom countertops that they glue and bond at the shop. Mason says they recently supplied a U-shaped one for a Victorian home, and “we’re in a lot of restaurants all over.”

Custom sliding pocket doors, mantels and mantelpieces, and accent walls are also popular. “If you can think of it, we can usually do it,” he says.

“There’s a certain way that we do it, and if you allow me to do it that way, I’ll do it for you. If you have something else in mind—for example, let’s say a two-by-six or two-by-eight piece of old-growth white oak or American chestnut you just want us to clean it up and get all those years of aging off of it—I probably won’t do it for you …

“The big-box stores will try to make reclaimed siding, but it’s not reclaimed, it’s brand-new. The wood we have—it’s old, it’s authentic. If you want a piece of American history, then I’m your guy.”