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Harold Miller, by his estimates, has more than 2 million board feet of reclaimed lumber at his 19-acre yard in Sheridan. Wood of seemingly every size, shape and type sit in hundreds – perhaps thousands – of stacked piles.

“When I first started, I took a lot of lumber from the St. Louis stockyards, the biggest stockyards in the U.S.,” he said. “That was 15 to 18 years ago. I still have a lot of that wood.”

The challenge now for Miller – and his business Reclaimed Accents Inc. – will be to unload that mountain of lumber before the elements degrade its value, said Terry Melzer, a sales representative with Cudahy Lumber Co. Time can take its toll on pieces at the bottom of the pile or those not given air pockets, he said.

“It’s a tough, tough business,” Melzer said. “You’re going to have in the 19 acres about five acres that he’s going to be able to make money out of and 14 acres that’s trash. Culling out the five acres that’s gold is where the hard work is.”

But Miller’s son, Paul, is spearheading an effort to spread word that Reclaimed Accents is joining competition that includes Viridian Reclaimed Wood Products and Salvage Works LLC in Portland. Reclaimed Accents is planning to invite contractors and designers to tour its property, and launch a website – – next week.

The web site is a good start, Melzer said. But he added that the Millers need to invest in more equipment and networking.

“What (Reclaimed Accents) needs to do is have open houses and barbecues,” he said. “Get every single architect in the Pacific Northwest and drag them out there. You have to see it and touch it to know see what’s available.”

Bend homebuilder Jess Alway discovered Reclaimed Accents through a family member who works in the reclaimed timber industry, he said.

Alway, owner of Alway Homes Inc., has built his past 10 homes using salvaged wood from Reclaimed Accents. For a 10,000-square-foot house in Salem, he used reclaimed oak handcrafted about 100 years ago. Harold Miller told him the wood came from a barn in Pennsylvania.

“To me, it’s like my wife going to Nordstrom,” Alway said. “I love going through that stuff.”

He has formed a strong bond with Harold Miller, he said, because they both appreciate the value of reclaimed wood.

“He knows every board by name and where it came from,” he said. “It gets kind of comical.”

Harold Miller, 73, said his earliest memories of collecting lumber date back to 1951, when his grandfather took apart an old barn.

“He pulled all the shingles and nails and straightened them out,” he said. “He took the building apart and built a new house out of what we took from it.”

Harold Miller later started a nursery business, but also began to collect things like old cars, tractors and massive amounts of wood. He has since shifted his focus back to wood.

“The last five years, the nursery business has come crashing down,” he said. “This has kept us alive.”

Most of Reclaimed Accents’ wood is Douglas fir – some from Boise Cascade mills in Oregon. Some oak, hickory and other hardwoods were disassembled piece by piece, nail by nail, from Amish barns in Indiana, Montana and Missouri, and old whiskey rack houses in Illinois.

“During prohibition, they made whiskey, but they couldn’t sell it,” Harold Miller said. “They had these 10-story houses that were owned by Hiram Walker. Some of this wood is wound so tight, you can hardly count the grain.”

The Millers and their four-person crew are in the business of painstaking disassembly. First comes the molding, then the flooring boards and wainscoting. Finally comes the roofing and rafters, the walls and the posts, said Paul Miller, the company’s president. Reclaimed Accents removes most of the nails and even power-washes some of the boards.

“We do it one board at a time, disassembling or deconstructing,” Harold Miller said. “We take it apart as it was put in, in reverse.”

Disassembly of one building, the old Boise Cascade veneer mill in St. Helens, required 10 months. The four-acre conifer plywood mill in Willamina required two years.

“People wonder why reclaimed wood is so expensive,” Paul Miller said. “You’ve got to take a lot of time with it.”

The Millers believe they can offer clients value. Melzer referred one of his customers, Brockamp & Jaeger Inc., to Reclaimed Accents. That led to some of its wood being used for a renovation of Hotel Rose in downtown Portland after the contractor had almost given up finding salvaged lumber within its budget.

But Harold Miller said the wood from the whiskey rack houses will command a bit more.

“I hold a ransom on some of my good wood,” he said.