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More than 800 baseball bats perch in the rafters of a lofty industrial building on Northwest St. Helens Road. Rows upon rows of rusted first-aid kits, dustpans and handsaws climb the walls, defying gravity. Elsewhere, square nails and toy ray guns and chipped aluminum lunch boxes and faded bottles of spirits and turpentine and Prince Albert pipe tobacco tins. There’s also a bar cart made from an old hospital gurney.
Die-hards help themselves to tin mugs of coffee and wander the cavernous halls of Lovett Deconstruction & Salvage Shop (4315 NW St. Helens Road, 503-954-2347, lovettdeconstruction.com), which owner Der Lovett calls “part reclaimed lumber yard, part vintage store, part museum.”
Lovett grew up in Cork, Ireland. A lifelong magpie, he started out collecting stamps and coins but also what many would simply call trash: grocery bags and bottle caps and candy bar wrappers.
“I’ve always been passionate about reuse, jumping into old dumpsters or ‘skips,’ as we called them,” he recalls, the faintest lilt of an Irish accent on his tongue. “I’m not interested in preciousness.”
Lovett arrived in Oregon in 1999 and began sourcing lumber for furniture at the then-brand-new ReBuilding Center. Soon he was working there, tearing apart old houses and saving what he could. In 2005, he started his own deconstruction business and began setting aside the Tonka trucks and baseball bats he’d find in dust-stuccoed attics.
Five years ago, he bought an auto garage and opened this salvage shop to house his collection of collections, which all sit in eerily tidy stacks or single-file lines: 500 toy dump trucks, piles of Radio Flyer wagons, cubbies of dented beer cans and ancient unopened bottles of Coca-Cola.
Such connoisseurs of one man’s trash are usually nostalgics. Not so with Lovett. His fleet of old pencil sharpeners evokes no fond grade school memories. Rather, it’s a legacy of product design, elegance and shifting trends born out of invention or efficiency that pulls him. “I just find beauty in these objects, the history of design, the patina of use,” he says. “Look at this door! It has been bumped for one hundred years.”
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