The Salvage Register
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About

Made in Nova Scotia, out of a love of thrifting

The Salvage Register started as a personal list of every dusty antique barn, church thrift room and Frenchys bin worth a detour. It grew into this.

Why I built it

I have spent years driving back roads on weekends looking for the good stuff — pine cupboards, milk glass, a perfect wool coat for four dollars. The problem was never a shortage of shops, it was that nobody had written them all down. Half of them are only on Facebook, half of those posts are from 2019, and a fair few of the places have quietly closed.

So I made the list I wanted: 310 antique, vintage, consignment, thrift and second-hand shops from Yarmouth to Cape Breton, each with an address, a phone number where one is published, and a link where there is one to link to.

How the listings are kept honest

  • Every shop is checked against its own website, social pages, and public directories before it goes on the register.
  • Anything we can't confirm is still open carries a red "call ahead" flag rather than being quietly presented as fact.
  • Shops that have closed are removed. If you spot one that's gone, or one we've missed, use "Suggest a shop" at the bottom of the register and it gets reviewed by hand.
  • Members add their own photos and star reviews, so the register gets better the more people use it.

Secure, and kept in Canada

Your account, reviews, photos and community board posts are stored in a managed Canadian database hosted in the Montréal, Québec region (AWS ca-central-1). The site itself is served over encrypted HTTPS from a global content network, with data at rest encrypted on those Canadian servers.

  • Sign-in is handled by a managed authentication service — either a Google account or a password that is stored only as a salted hash. Nobody, including me, can read your password.
  • Row-level security rules mean your account can only ever read and change your own reviews, photos and sale postings.
  • Photos live in a private storage bucket and are shown through short-lived signed links rather than public URLs.
  • Card details never touch this site. Payments run through Paddle, our merchant of record, which is PCI-DSS compliant. We only ever see your subscription status.

Keep the register on your home screen

The Salvage Register works like an app once you save it to your phone's home screen — it opens full-screen, with its own icon, no browser bars and no app store download. Here's how:

On iPhone — Safari

thesalvageregister.com
  1. 1
    Open this site in Safari. Type thesalvageregister.com in the address bar at the bottom.
  1. 2
    Tap the Share button — the square with an arrow pointing up, at the bottom of the screen.
Add to Home Screen
  1. 3
    Scroll down and tap “Add to Home Screen”, then tap “Add”. The register's key icon lands on your home screen.
Salvage
  1. 4
    Done — tap the key icon any time and the register opens full-screen, like a proper app.

On Android — Chrome

thesalvageregister.com
  1. 1
    Open this site in Chrome. Type thesalvageregister.com in the address bar at the top.
  1. 2
    Tap the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of the browser.
Add to Home screen
  1. 3
    Tap “Add to Home screen” (or “Install app”), then confirm.
Salvage
  1. 4
    Done — tap the key icon any time and the register opens full-screen, like a proper app.

A one-person operation

This is not a big company. It's one Nova Scotian with a spreadsheet habit and a car full of finds. Membership fees keep the servers running and pay for the time spent phoning shops to check they're still there. Thank you for supporting it.