Rick Bulan rests his hand on a worn 12-foot chunk of steel in his San Francisco warehouse workshop, ticking off the items he imagines turning it into.

Maybe two headboards, a few coffee tables and a bunch of business card holders. Or perhaps a dining table and lots of jewelry.

The red steel will be sandblasted, raced on, cut and welded into ordinary pieces of furniture, but its origin is unmistakable — the Golden Gate Bridge.

“When I make stuff from it, you can tell where it comes from. It’s very distinct,” Bulan said. “No other bridge has that.”

Workers removed more than 6,500 feet of handrail, worn from exposure to wind and ocean, from the bridge’s western side in 1993 and 1994. Bulan, a San Francisco native, bought almost the entire supply. The small business that resulted, Golden Gate Design & Furniture Co., has been Bulan’s livelihood ever since.

A selection of completed products sitting in his shop includes wide, sturdy picture frames, a side table with a Kentucky whiskey barrel serving as the top, and a nightstand with a glass top made in Oakland. All the material incorporated into Bulan’s pieces is U.S.-made.

“I have a tendency to make what I like first,” Bulan said. “And then it’s like, ‘Oh, anybody want to buy it?’”

A high price accompanies the one-of-a-kind, handcrafted furniture: $2,500 for a side table, the most popular piece, and up to $19,000 for an executive desk, the most expensive.

In 1993, he was working in the trade show industry. One day a news flash on TV caught his eye — a picture of men hoisting a hefty piece of steel off the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was a 12-foot piece of handrail, but to Bulan, the hunk of steel suspended in the air looked like something else: a headboard.

Several obstacles emerged after he negotiated its purchase. The steel weighed 1,000 pounds. It wouldn’t fit in his two-seater convertible. He hired a truck to move his prize home, where he spent a month trying to whittle it down to a manageable-size headboard using an abrasive blade on a Skilsaw — a technique he laughs about today. He didn’t know anything about welding back then.

The idea snowballed from there. A friend saw the unique piece above Bulan’s bed and wanted one. He bought more steel and made a second headboard.

“Next thing you know, I made a deal to buy the rest,” Bulan said. “And then I’ve been making furniture from it ever since.”

Bulan, then in his 20s, said bridge builders threw out a figure for the entire supply of steel — and he paid it. He doesn’t remember exactly how much it cost, but said it was the equivalent of a down payment on a house.

He bought the steel about a year after it came off the bridge. Some people had purchased little pieces of it, but by the time he came along, there was plenty left. It didn’t appear there was much competition.

Today, steel of such famous provenance might go fast. In 2015, the Oakland Museum began a competitive three-step application process to award 15 artists and designers steel from the Bay Bridge to create public installations throughout the state, including the San Francisco waterfront, Oakland and Treasure Island.

Bulan, too, has a supply of Bay Bridge steel, but he declined an offer to acquire more. People weren’t as interested, he said, because after he cut it up into furniture, they could hardly tell which structure it came from. The Golden Gate steel, manufactured in the 1930s by Bethlehem Steel, is distinctive, he said.

Interest in his furniture remains strong. Bulan said his supply is back-ordered for about six weeks. Demand comes in waves, usually amping up in the months before Christmas.

The operation hasn’t changed much since it began more than two decades ago. Bulan crafts each piece himself by hand, with some help from occasional contractors.

He says he likes to keep the company small. While he makes furniture, his wife handles correspondence. They have twin 11-year-old daughters and a 16-year-old son. The flexible hours allowed Bulan to volunteer at his kids’ school.

Bulan doesn’t advertise much anymore, but has sold pieces to customers around the world simply through word of mouth. Recent shipments went to France, Canada and Scotland.

His customers range from people who got engaged on the bridge to people who just visited the city once. He’s had some purchasers tell him about grandparents who helped build or paint the bridge when it was constructed in the 1930s.

Frazee and her husband, Howard, bought a lamp and occasional table from Bulan around the time he was first getting started. Howard’s divorced parents lived on either side of the bridge, and the bridge came to feel to him like a junction.

The Frazees’ home was destroyed in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. They lost everything. But the two pieces of Golden Gate steel, mangled and scorched, survived.

Lisa Frazee reached out to Bulan, worried that all these years later his business might not be around. When he heard how much these pieces meant to them, Bulan sandblasted, rewired and repainted the lamp free of charge. He created a new table from the steel of the burned one, too, which the Frazees will put in the home they’re building on their old property.

“I was just so glad because we lost everything, and it was just the idea we could put something back in our house that we had before,” Frazee said.

He took the bridge for granted until it became his “bread and butter,” he said. But growing up in San Francisco, he has fond memories of Sundays spent with his family near the famous structure.

When he was 8, he and his brother and cousins would clamber up the underbelly of the bridge and swing from the lowest parts.

Bulan stores the steel in a horse corral in Fremont. He never used to worry whether he had enough, but the last time Bulan went to pick up a new supply, he had a startling realization that he hasn’t got much left. Three to five stacks measuring less than 10 feet each remain.

“It’s getting scary,” Bulan said. “When you work on something so long and it gets toward the end, it’s like, ‘Wow, what am I going to do after this?’”

How long it lasts depends on what customers order, so Bulan doesn’t know how long he’s got left before the stock comes up short.

Anna Bauman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: anna.bauman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @abauman2

Anna Bauman is a reporter from Kansas City, MO covering breaking news for The San Francisco Chronicle metro desk. She recently graduated from the University of Oklahoma where she studied English and worked at the OU Daily student newspaper.