Hey, if you guys like old glass, check your local salvage yards. The latest fad perpetuated by the vinyl industry is to convince people to rip out their perfectly good century-old wood windows and replace them with crappy vinyl windows which are supposed to be more energy-efficient, but usually aren't. (The victims of this fraud could have weatherized their beautiful old windows for half the cost and twice the aesthetic appeal.)
So, the old windows end up in a dumpster (yours for free) or a salvage yard (yours for a song) complete with all that lovely old rippled glass. Until three months ago I worked at a company with a salvage yard, and we had to turn people away with whole windows still in their frames, because we had so many we couldn't take more, and that was despite
*giving* them away, literally. The non-profit salvage yard down the street from my house has hundreds of old windows with their original glass, all dirt-cheap.
Portland, OR. Our salvage contacts in a number of other regions are experiencing the same phenomenon, but if it's not the case in your area, perhaps the vinyl-window sellers haven't hit yet... or maybe they hit earlier, and people are trying to undo the damage.
In which case, you're in a prime position to take a truck to either the NW or the Midwest, and load up on windows for resale in your area! ;)
In St Louis there doesn't seem to be "salvage" for sale, not like other places. I've been in one shop, years ago, with unbelievably high prices for very plain stuff, but that's the only place I've ever found. A neighbor of mine runs an upscale boutique specializing in decorating stuff, and her yard and house are filled with salvage -- mostly trucked in from Chicago due to the local lack. At least that's what I hear.
LOL! The reason for that is probably that we send a truck out twice a year and buy all the salvage we can get our hands on... I suspect that the salvage market may be dry there because all the salvagers sell to out-of-staters. I hate to tell you, and sometimes it makes me sad to see so much beautiful architectural salvage displaced in a sort of salvage diaspora, but my store (I keep saying that even though I quit three months ago... but I have deep ties to it that I can't quite shake) considers St. Louis, along with several other cities, to be absolute goldmines of salvage.
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