MIKE WHITESIDE, PICTURED
Sometimes, Orlando Shine gets invited to get outside of our Central Florida bubble and visit another beautiful part of the country as part of our Road Trip series. While we’re on the road, we tend to bump into some amazing people, which is why we launched our new Field Trip features to shine a light on the equally amazing people who come across our path.
Mike Whiteside has spent 26 years making a living out of other people’s demolished leftovers.
He’s the co-founder of Black Dog Salvage (Instagram | Website), the 40,000 SF architectural salvage warehouse in Roanoke, Virginia, that most people recognize from Salvage Dawgs, the DIY Network and HGTV reality show he and business partner Robert Kulp starred in for 11 seasons and 143 episodes between 2012 and 2020. Orlando Shine caught up with Whiteside for a tour of the warehouse as the business works through a major reorganization.
“We called this the Salvage side,” Whiteside said, walking through a room stacked with reclaimed hardware, doors, and architectural bits and bobs laid out for sale. “The rest of the building, this is where all the found objects were, the stuff we’ve either reclaimed, bought, or pulled out of the dumpster, and sold it over here.”
Doors, he said, are the backbone of the business. “Doors are kind of like our meat and potatoes. We sell more doors than pretty much anything else in the salvage industry.” The appeal, Whiteside said, comes down to what a door is made from. A modern door has wide grain spacing. A door from the 1930s is built from old-growth heart pine, with a tighter grain and a different look that people will pay top dollar for. “It wasn’t vintage when they built it,” he said. “It became vintage.” And that’s because we just don’t build things like they used to.
Most of what fills the warehouse comes with a story attached. A double-sided panel of B-board once housed the pipes of an organ salvaged from First Baptist Church in Bluefield. A collection of stained glass came from Roses, North Carolina, English glass shipped in by the container. A set of stacked chair pieces started life as decommissioned wooden fishing boats, and were cut apart after being replaced by more efficient fiberglass hulls.
“What we do is not junk,” Whiteside said. “What we do is preservation and restoration, collecting stuff that most of the time hits the dumpster or the landfill. We’re in between the wrecking ball and the landfill.”
That work occasionally gets physical and sometimes gets a little spicy. Whiteside recalled getting chased off a demolition site by a track hoe operator mid-job, pulling windows from the front of a house while the machine knocked down the back. “Those people, time is money,” he said.
Whiteside and Kulp founded Black Dog Salvage in 1999 after salvaging pieces from an 1892 home slated for demolition in Roanoke. The business incorporated in 2000 and expanded into its current 40,000 SF warehouse in 2003, later adding a second, 20,000 SF receiving warehouse less than a mile away.
Salvage Dawgs premiered on the DIY Network in November 2012 and ran until January 2020, ending after DIY Network’s rebrand into Magnolia Network. Whiteside described the show’s end as bittersweet, recalling the crew becoming an extended family over eight years of production. “We watched people get married and have kids,” he said. “I miss the amount our crew became family.”
He said producers never offered him an on-screen producer credit for the location scouting work he did behind the scenes, tracking down demolition sites and building relationships with contractors and property owners across the region. “That’s really my job,” he said. “That’s my fun.”
These days, Whiteside said the operation is consolidating its salvage inventory into the newer warehouse a mile away, freeing up space in the original building to lease to Roanoke Mountain Adventures (Website), an outdoor recreation and consignment outfitter set to open in the space by September 1. Black Dog also hosts a monthly live music series on the property in partnership with a local nonprofit serving the hearing-impaired community, now in its sixth or seventh year.
Whiteside said the warehouse regularly draws visitors from out of town, sometimes ahead of Roanoke locals themselves. “It’s amazing how many people from out of town bring locals that have never been,” he said. “We’ve been in business 26 years and still, to this day, locals are brought in here for the first time.”
Black Dog Salvage is located in Roanoke’s Grandin Village neighborhood and is a must-see for anyone visiting that slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
