ED MATTHEWS / Staff

Bass & Bass Flea Mart, located off Industrial Blvd., specializes in buying and selling used, new, overstock and scratch-and-dent building materials and hardware. The store owned by Sylvia Fescher and Pascal Martin, features a wide variety of items, including over 1500 toilet lids, stoves, cabinets, door knobs and even a few bowling balls.

ED MATTHEWS / Staff

Bass & Bass co-owner Sylvia Fescher talks on the phone while customer Lavon Coate sorts through glass window panes on Wednesday, July 16, 2008. Bass & Bass owners Fescher and Pascal Martin buy used, new, overstock and scratch-and-dent building materials and hardware and sell them at their store on Industrial Blvd. The store features a wide variety of items, including over 1500 toilet lids, stoves, cabinets, door knobs and even a few bowling balls.

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Fretting about finding a replacement for your fuchsia toilet tank lid?

Maybe about where to get the replacement tiles for the backsplash of your kitchen that have been discontinued? Or the long-desired hot tub for the backyard?

Naples salvage yard Bass & Bass Flea Mart is to unwanted building materials what animal shelters are to abandoned pets: a chance to get cleaned up and given a new home.

For the handyman or do-it-yourself remodeler, the 0.75-acre lot on Industrial Boulevard in East Naples is a temporary home for the scratched, dented, used or overstocked orphans of the construction industry.

There is no fanfare, no air conditioning, no original packaging.

But toilets and bidets? Check. Custom-made 10-foot-tall solid wood doors, never-hung chandelier and switch plates unscrewed from hundreds of walls? Yup. Granite countertops from kitchens that the first wife installed and the second wife didn’t like?

That, too, all lined up along two aisles, half covered, that run the length of the salvage yard.

The inventory collected from about 25 years in business is more random than any big-box home improvement store could ever be and includes bowling balls, a World Book encyclopedia from 1989 and a VHS of a 1950s Indian film at one end; at the other are custom-made solid wood doors that didn’t fit into the home they were built for.

In between are thousands of switch plates, microwaves, doorknobs and fuse boxes, and a pair of leather ice skates that look a few decades into their life.

The owner even claims to have 1,500 toilet tank lids, and from the looks of things, she may not be far off.

When Sylvia Fechner and Pascal Martin, both in their 40s, bought the business in 2004, they inherited years of inventory.

They add to the stock every week with items they buy from or that are donated by remodelers looking to avoid hauling the items out to the dump.

Martin is a one-man demolition crew, since the couple are the only staff. When they get calls from handymen or homeowners who want to sell or donate, he heads out to survey the goods.

Given the limited space on their lot, the room they have must be carefully allocated.

“If it won’t sell quickly, I won’t take it,” says Martin.

Running a salvage yard isn’t the most conventional business, and that’s what attracted the couple.

When they moved to Naples three years ago, they left behind family, friends and jobs at a zoo owned by Fechner’s family in the Canary Islands.

“It was a new experience for us,” says Fechner. “When we tell our friends back home that we sell toilets, they say, ‘What?!’ in disbelief.”

Since Bass & Bass will take in “everything but furniture” for a home, explains Fechner, toilets are, indeed, fair game.

Not ones for desk jobs, Fechner and Martin, who speak fluent Spanish, French and English, say they enjoy being outdoors and on their feet most of the day; they only take Sundays off.

The Franco-Iberian pair met the previous owner, Angelika Morales, through friends in Europe; she worked for the business’s namesake, James Bass, and took over Bass & Bass in the 1990s.

When Morales said she wanted to sell and move back to Germany, Fechner and Martin decided to give life in the U.S. a try.

In 2004, they bought the business and began the E-2 visa process. The following year, they were sorting through the inventory to tidy up and create more space.

Three years later, business is steady with people taking advantage of the slow summer season and economic slump to hire remodelers for less.

At the hottest time of day, a stuffy Wednesday afternoon before the rain clouds broke, a dozen people pass through in an hour. Martin has already sweated through his red T-shirt after hauling kitchen cabinets from a Port Royal home to the salvage yard in his pickup truck.

Bonnie Riseman walks the aisles of bathtubs and sinks on the hunt for glass shelves and a wall-mountable towel rack to install in her bathroom.

She checks the Bass & Bass offerings before buying retail.

“We’re in a time when people need to be more practical. The fuel, the manpower, the energy to make something new, is it worth it?” she muses.

Salvage yard shopping requires patience and keeping an eye out for future projects, advises Riseman, who hits up the storefront once a year.

But inventory changes every week, so there is no guarantee of what will be around next time.

“It’s also about doing things green. I know people are tired of hearing it, but it makes sense,” says Riseman.

Fort Myers handyman Jorge Vega drives into Naples every day for work, and the people who currently hired him to install sturdier windows for hurricane season in their Golden Gate home asked for the best deal — even if it meant getting used ones.

“I used to come every once in awhile, said Vega, measuring tape in hand. “I come a lot more frequently now.”

Some homeowners are willing to just give them the items as long as they will dismantle them and haul it away — saving money for the owners and providing inventory for Fechner and Martin.

Earliest accounts of Bass & Bass history put the salvage yard at about 24 years old.

County records show Bass & Bass at a location on Harbor Road in Naples in the mid-1980s; by the early ’90s, it was at the current location.

Brian Jones, who co-owns the land the salvage yard is on through Naples-based Lemae Partners and Tamiami Builders, remembers the original owner, James Bass, as “an old guy who drove an old, beat-up truck.”

“He was the junk man for the town. You’d have to be a piece of work to do that. You’d have to be cut from a different cloth,” recalls Jones, who bought the property in August 1996.

“I don’t know anyone (else) in town that’s actually doing that ... rather than fill up the landfill,” says Jones.

The salvage yard even got national press when Bob Vila visited during a renovation of a Naples “Cracker Cottage” for the “Home Again” series in 1991.

A six-minute video on the series’ Web site shows the remodeling Renaissance man touring the market for a pocket door and sinks.

“If and when (Bass & Bass) goes, it may be the last one,” he adds.