As demolition experts we come across all types of reclaimed items, items that you wouldn’t expect anyone to make any sort of use from, but you would be surprised.
At Steptoe’s Yard we work on demolition contracts across the whole of the UK and on all sorts of buildings from small houses, streets full of houses, small mills to large mills and on each and every project there are items collected that simply sit in the yard, often for a couple of years, maybe longer.

We often win contracts to demolish large mills, maybe 18th century buildings, lots of these types of buildings will have big dominating gates on the front, not much scrap value and often very hard to see how you could make use of them afterwards, but to someone who once worked in the mill or maybe even owned it or a family member of the previous owners, items like this can be quite sentimental. Gates that once stood towering over a factory entrance for 100 years, intimidating gates, can be put to use on a residential property, once cleaned up they can look quite impressive and still hold the sentiment.

We recently demolished a waterside mill and acquired some steel water wheels, quite ugly and pointless unless driving the machine they were built for they were left to sit at the back of our yard for quite some time until one day a chap browsing through our reclaimed York stone spotted them and it turned out he had been looking for one for some time to make a garden ornament from so as well as buying stone for a large patio he bought himself an iron water wheel.

Another popular garden item are old chimney pots, often you will have seen them holding plants and flowers in front or back gardens, usually a quick polish up and they look smashing, occasionally they are painted up in a whole host of colours.
The amount of ‘treasure’ we unearth on some of our projects is immense, items that can be used for garden furniture or bird tables etc.

It really is worth a visit to Steptoe’s Yard to see what we have knocking about in the form of reclaimed items that can be used in your garden.