Roy Clifford, owner of The Salvage Shop, at work
By Tricia Chan
At the Salvage Shop at 1492 Kingston Rd. you can find a variety of antique furniture, vintage textiles and outdated accessories.
One thing you can’t find is a standard antique dealer.
“I’m a professional finder, that’s the thing I’m the best at,” said Roy Clifford, the store owner who sourced all the unique items in the shop. “I can’t help finding it.”
Rents movie props
While regular customers frequent the main store for textiles, trinkets or simply to browse, movie production companies rent a lot of props from Clifford, to the point that he has set up a snack bar for them in his warehouse.
“They come in so frantic and stressed and pressed for time that if they don’t see what they want right away they want to leave,” he said, adding that low blood sugar makes everyone irrational.
“If I can get them to sit down and have a snack or a drink for a minute then usually I can help them find what they need.”
He has an entire trailer filled with vintage fountain stations, old soda memorabilia and anything you could need to recreate a sock hop at a diner or June Cleaver’s dream kitchen.
Wandering through the warehouse, he stops and points out a set of lights.
“Those lights can easily come down, and they were in Saw 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… Did they make a Seven?” he asks.
They did. It was called Saw 3-D though.
Expanding since 2000
Since opening the first store in 2000, Clifford has added adjacent workshops on the same stretch of Kingston Rd. (west of Manderley) to accommodate his inventory and make room for his own creative projects.
“Actually I had leased this place twelve years ago to do just that,” said Clifford of his intention to begin custom concrete work out of the particular shop we were in. “I thought I had to make myself into a master carpenter to make the moulds and everything but just figured out later I was procrastinating.”
While it may have felt like procrastination, preparation is a more appropriate term.
“That’s a turbine from a factory and it runs on a very small engine but when it’s on it causes a breeze in here and when you’re sweeping the shop the dust goes about an inch off the floor and disappears,” explains Clifford as he points to a silver circle at the back of the trailer.
“It’s a big part of the workshop ‘cause you don’t want dust in the air all of the time.”
Along with this ventilation system is an oxygen enrichment program, also conceptualized by Clifford.
“This is a vent,” he said as he pointed to a window. “So in the summer when there’s a breeze or anything, that opens up and I’ve got some plants too, some smaller plants so in the summertime you can come in here and the oxygen is really good.”
A “mechanical mind”
From engineering his own ventilation system for the shop out of an old turbine from a factory, to formulating his own concrete recipes, to ripping burners out of pizza ovens to heat the machines he’s made, Clifford has never let his lack of an engineering degree dissuade his mechanical mind.
“I love tools and we can make almost anything here,” said Clifford.
“We were making pie safes and corner cupboards and stuff like that and people were coming up to me asking, ‘How old is this?’ and I’d have to think back to, ‘Was it Wednesday or Thursday?’” he says. “Does it still feel sticky? Using the reclaimed lumber and stuff really helps the look.”
Working with concrete
The same applies for his artistic side. Having never gone to design school, he was inspired to begin working with concrete after he learned about California designer Fu-Tung Cheng, who was using the material for countertops.
“You can make anything out of concrete,” Clifford said. “I’m going to start out small with these little birds: a concrete robin, a concrete cardinal and I have some nice little concrete ducks. So I’ll start out small and get my mixes right. I already did a mix once and put it in a blister package and it came out really well.”
Clifford has plans to tow and demo a trailer featuring his concrete work around the design show circuit in spring 2015.
Helping the community
As for this year, Clifford wants to start a program that focuses on building self-esteem for at-risk youth in the community through learning skills and work ethic rather than obtaining material goods.
Clifford wants the community to support his initiative and support the kids in the community instead of ostracizing them.
“A lot of kids around here have it tough,” said Clifford, adding many may be dealing with addiction or abuse in the home, or are simply living in poverty.
“And there are a lot of craftspeople and artists who would be willing to have them apprentice, learn, help out. We can show them how to express themselves creatively and hey, maybe make some money too.”
At the Salvage Shop, second chances are not only reserved for antiques.
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More photos below
Wagon, circa 1936
Vintage music player
Kelvinator refrigerator, the “Cadillac of fridges”, according to Roy
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