The yard / About
About - Builders Surplus, Inc.
The yard
A gravel lot in Dallas with bins down both sides, an office in a shed, and a ledger that gets written at five o'clock whether the day went well or not. Material comes in off buildings that are coming down. It gets sorted, tagged, and put back to work by somebody else.
How the day goes
Gate hours are a habit, not a slogan
The published hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Central Time. Around those hours the yard keeps a rhythm that has not changed much.
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Before nine
Chain off, gravel walked, tarps re-staked. The bins get looked at before anybody is allowed to look at them.
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Nine to eleven
Unloading. Anything that arrived yesterday gets pulled apart, sorted and binned while the yard is still quiet.
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Midday
Visitors at the gate, questions answered on the spot. If somebody needs a match, this is when the shelves get walked bin by bin.
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Afternoon
Loading, tagging, and the bench work that turns into the guides: a door stripped, a sash re-glazed, a hinge freed.
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Five o'clock
The ledger gets written. Lot number, where it came from, what it is good for. Chain back on after that.
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Friday
Bins re-tagged and the week's notes cleaned up before they go on this site. Tags that fell off get replaced, not guessed at.
Weekends the gate stays shut. So does the phone, which is why email is the better way to reach us about something that can wait.
Ask first
Call before you load
A bin that held forty doors on Tuesday can hold twelve by Friday. Ten seconds on the telephone saves a wasted trip across town with a truck and a trailer.
Why salvage
The material is not finished yet
It is better stuff than what replaced it
Old-growth heart pine, solid-core doors, sash glass that has already survived a hundred summers. New material is not always worse, but it is often lighter, and it rarely lasts as long as the thing we pulled it out of.
Buildings match themselves, not catalogues
A patch in 1940s brick with 2020s brick looks like a patch from the street. Salvage is the only way a repair disappears into the wall it is repairing.
A lot of it still has a story worth keeping
The school corridor, the church side wall, the freight shed. Writing down where a lot came from is not sentiment; it is the only record left once the building is gone.
Said plainly
A door that stuck for forty years still knows how to swing. Our job is to keep it out of the dumpster long enough for somebody to find out.
Yard foreman, at the gate
What the yard will not do
Three no's, up front
Better to hear them here than at the loading bay with a truck running.
No online orders
Nothing on this site is reserved, held, ordered or paid for. The site publishes notes, guides and the glossary; the yard does business by telephone, by email and at the gate. That is not a technical limitation, it is the way the place works.
No guarantees on glazing
We will tell you honestly whether a pane is flat, clear and worth re-glazing. We will not promise that old glass behaves. It breaks on its own schedule, sometimes years after it goes back in a sash, and no yard can warrant against that.
No demolition service
We do not take buildings apart and we do not send a crew to a job site. If material has to come out of a structure, that work belongs to the contractor doing the demolition, and we will happily talk to them about what is worth saving first.
What the yard does do
- Takes in surplus building material and sorts it into tagged bins.
- Writes down where a lot came from, and labels a guess as a guess.
- Walks the shelves bin by bin when somebody needs a match for a sample.
- Publishes the reuse guides for the jobs that come up every week.
- Answers the telephone during the hours on the board by the gate.
Come and look
Builders Surplus, Inc. - 7248 Birchwood Dr, Dallas
Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Central Time. Ask for Carol Devereaux, or leave a message and it will be answered the same working day.