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My name is Tim Sway, and I am the sole member of Tim Sway Perspectives.
I make things. Furniture, art, and whatnot, out of reclaimed materials, salvaged materials, stuff I find on the side of the road.
I like taking things that have been used one way, and misusing them, and using them again in another way.
I'm just fascinated by, you know, taking things that people consider no long useful and making them useful again.
I tend to collect a little bit, I drive around in this old truck here
And whatever I see on the side of the road for free that looks cool, I throw into it.
I've become kind of a connoisseur of shipping pallets.
There's a, you know I can spot the shipping pallet that I want you know, from like 6 blocks.
There's like, a color to it, signifying how old it is or what type of wood it is.
I tend to not like using the reclaimed lumber from a supplier
Because it's all milled and planed and it's sorta like working with new material, just that's old.
And I like it when I'm pulling the nails out myself, and I'm choosing how refinished it gets.
To me, up-cycled sorta connotes that something was something, and is now being used as something else.
Recycled would mean, that you're sort of saving something. That to me would be the, kinda like the side of the road, might be the recycled.
And the reclaimed is more like the, oh I'm going to tear this down and save the wood and you have fresh lumber.
I like to think of myself as an 'up-cyclist'.
I think that some of my favorite pieces have been like, a broken bass drum that is no longer functioning as a drum
So I up-cycled it into a coffee table or a chair.
That's what I like to do. That's my favorite thing.
Because you have the added bonus of the story behind the material.
Like these chairs for instance.
This chair was made out of some old train station carts that were used for like, how many years hauling people's stuff around.
And then they ended up in this basement for about 30 years,
and the guy that owns the basement wanted them out, so I got them, and I made stuff out of them.
I absolutely think that people are being more conscious of what they buy.
From just the whole eating local movement
and I think that as our technology has made the world infinitely smaller, I think we've realized how much is actually available to us in our region
I think we are aware of the fact every time you ship a crate from China, there's an environmental impact and there's a cost impact.
So if I can make a coffee table that's going to remind people of that every day,
and maybe when they go to the super market, they think a little more carefully about what they eat,
and they stop at the farm stand instead.
They think about it as they're throwing something away
"Oh you know what, maybe this has some use. Some guy like the dude who made my coffee table could use this."
Instead of just throwing it away, they reuse it, they give it away, you know, someone else finds life for it. That's what I'm doing, I'm making reminders of that I think.