The flooring in the shed is recycled wood pulled from an apartment in Boston that was being refurbished. After multiple emails and calls to a local demolition company about the possibility of any wood that they might throwing away we were contacted, given an address in the city and told that they were pulling up old flooring and that we could come and get as much as we could take away before they filled up their truck that would be heading to the dump with the old boards.
We rushed down and filled our truck with literally as much as we could carry.
It turns out to be really difficult to use the old boards. They were not very straight and all different thickness as they had been pulled from multiple rooms. To install them each one had to be held in place by one person while the other nailed them in. It took forever to get them in and even after that was done we had to rent a floor sander and go over the boards 7 different times before we got everything down to the same thickness.
In the end we were really happy with the floor and glad to have reused something that would have been destroyed. It now looks beautiful and most people are really surprised when they see what the boards looked like before we refinished, but this was definitely an example of reusing something at the cost of a lot of sweat and time. Hard work but well worth it.