I love stories like the one below because they inspire me to be more thoughtful about the building process. A lot of the things we’ve done to this point with the Dellwood house have been in the spirit of green-ness, but I won’t lie and say that some of those decisions to reuse old portions of the house were driven by our limited budget.
Hiring a crew to rip out virtually everything old, bad, or in need of a little work would have been a lot faster and easier — with the right budget — but would have been the wrong thing to do. It also would have been a mistake.
One of the great things about our project is that we were able to reuse so much of the wood from areas we cleared in other areas of the house. A wall in the studio originally had some termite damage, so we grabbed a bound-for-the-Dumpster baseboard from one of the rooms, ripped it, and installed it as a new plate. The old 2×4s are incredibly dense, old growth pine and after 86 years in the house are still straighter than any piece of lumber you can buy at Lowes!
Link to the original article
October 18, 2007
Recycling the Whole House
By KRISTINA SHEVORY
IF the idiosyncratic, ’40s-era cottage Alice Keller bought in Shoreline, a small city just north of Seattle, had a style, it might be called classic teardown. The ceiling in one room was so low she couldn’t stand up under it. A downstairs bathroom was so narrow she had to wiggle sideways to get to the toilet. None of the windows matched.
“It was livable, and quirky,” Ms. Keller said, “but in ways I didn’t find amusing.”
The place was crying out for a wrecking ball, but Ms. Keller, a 63-year-old retired teacher of English as a second language, who has an environmentally aware conscience, didn’t want to scrap the building materials only to buy new ones. Instead of having her 1,300-square-foot house bulldozed, she hired Jon Alexander, a contractor who shared her environmentalism and was willing to dismantle the home shingle by beam, and build a replacement with the same two-by-fours.
The crew left the garage and a portion of the subfloor intact and broke the concrete driveway into chunks for a back patio. A gas water heater, fiberglass insulation and windows landed at the RE Store, a local nonprofit shop that sells used or excess construction materials. The drywall, shingles and extra concrete went to a recycling center.
Ms. Keller was able to reuse around 90 percent of the original house. “I just like reusing things,” she said. “You can end up with something with more character.”
Read more…
Blah, Our House
