Renovating a Queenslander: Reduce, reuse, recycle - renovating with reclaimed items

In my humble opinion, wherever possible, using reclaimed items in an old house makes sense. Both financial, environmentally and aesthetically. That said, finding the 'right' items is not as easy as it sounds. We spent months driving around SE Queensland and Northern NSW picking up twin light french doors (we needed 8 sets), hopscotch windows with arctic / obscure glass, fan lights, 3 and 4 panel highwaisted internal doors and a margin light feature door. We also had to match the reclaimed items with existing sash windows that were wine and green in colour in the old fashioned arctic glass pattern. The existing windows were also suffering from a great deal of wood rot, though fortunately most was contained to the frames in which the windows sat. These were much easier to replace than the actual windows themselves.

Secondhand dealers can provide a faster means of procuring the items you're after, but some of them charge almost as much as buying a reproduction item! As such, given the expensive nature of our renovation plans, we sourced most of our items from eBay and Gumtree and I must say - we saved thousands of dollars. That said, if you factor in the labour time required to strip back nearly a century's worth of paint and grime, one does have frequent moments when you question your sanity and if the cost savings were really worth it. Fortunately, once the endless and dreary task of sanding and repairing windows and doors is complete, the end result is an item that has a story with every dent and a clear "patina" that gives the house its character. Just be prepared to sand away your fingerprints and fingernails.

Special credit should be mentioned here to my father, who spent a fortnight hand sanding and repairing the front door before taking it to a headlight glazier who painstakingly repaired the glass headlight that had bowed out when the timber surround expanded.

We also found bought some reproduction windows, which were second hand but had never been used, at a third of their retail price. All in all, the effort was all worth it! The only hiccup we had was the need to install safety glass / safety film on the french doors.

There were several instances when we had to use new items. The internal door from the garage to the hallway had to be made (2340mm) as the stairs on the other side meant a normal 2040mm doorway would result in my tall husband banging his head as he stepped down into the garage. We also bought reproduction breezeways, to match the only surviving original one in the house, and fanlights to fit above the five sets of the french doors. We were able to source three sets of matching fanlights, but as each set of doors varied slightly in size, it was very difficult to find matching fanlights for all of them. They were surprisingly well priced for a made to order item so I think it was a worthwhile investment.

Details are as follows:

All french doors (except for the master bedroom) are known as twin light french doors (Source: Ebay, Gumtree and Grand Ideas reclamation yard in northside Brisbane)
Master bedroom eight light french doors (Source: Ebay)
Fanlights (Source: Grand ideas reclamation yard and new ones made up by Finlayson's to match existing doors exactly)