Recycling the Whole House

A modest 1,300sf home north of Seattle has been lovingly disassembled with a new home rebuilt from the components. Due to rising landfill costs, tighter recycling guidelines and the growing trend toward ecologically sound building methods, this sort of home “deconstruction,” as the practice is called, is starting to catch on. About 1,000 homes a year are disassembled this way, according to the US Building Materials Reuse Association, a nonprofit educational group in State College, Pa., which reports growing interest in the practice.

The story was picked up by the New York Times and the text is reproduced below.

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.”

Due to rising landfill costs, tighter recycling guidelines and the
growing trend toward ecologically sound building methods, this sort of
home “deconstruction,” as the practice is called, is starting to catch
on. About 1,000 homes a year are disassembled this way, according to
the Building Materials Reuse Association, a nonprofit educational group
in State College, Pa., which reports growing interest in the practice.

Fueling that interest are efforts by cities and states across the
country to stanch the flow of demolition rubble into landfills. Some
245,000 houses in the United States are razed each year, generating
nearly 20 million tons of debris, according to a 1996 report from the Environmental Protection Agency, the most recent data available.

Confronted with mounting waste, the Massachusetts Department of
Environmental Protection has banned brick, concrete, metal, wood and
asphalt from landfills.

In San Jose, Calif. — where construction and demolition refuse
accounts for 30 percent of landfill waste, according to official
estimates — homeowners who apply for a city permit to demolish, remodel
or build an addition have to pay a deposit based on the size and type
of project. To get the money back, they must show that 90 percent of
the material generated has been reused or sent to a certified recycling
or reuse center. Cities including Seattle, and Chicago have also
introduced measures to reduce construction and demolition waste.

Using old materials for new buildings isn’t a new idea. The Coliseum
in Rome was used as a quarry to build St. Peter’s Basilica and other
Roman landmarks. In the United States, families often reused building
materials to save money in the early part of the 20th century, a custom
that fell out of favor as the country grew wealthier in the 1950s.

Today, according to the Building Materials Reuse Association, up to
85 percent of the average house can be recycled or reused; the hard
part is harvesting the materials in a way that preserves their
integrity.

Unbuilding a home takes longer than leveling it the usual way and
often costs more, at least initially. While almost anyone who’s watched
a TLC rehab show can rip out a kitchen cabinet, unpiecing an entire
house without having the roof collapse isn’t a job for the uninitiated.
The Building Materials Reuse Association, which introduced a
deconstruction training program in May, has certified 60 builders so
far.

When Carolyn Bronstein and John Tapper wanted to dismantle a
2,500-square-foot Victorian adjacent to their house in the Southport
section of Chicago, they could not find a local deconstruction
contractor. They recruited Ted Reiff, a contractor and the president of
a group called the Reuse People of America, based in Oakland, Calif.
The couple bought the house for about $800,000, intending to knock it
down so their children could have more space to play, and to make sure
a developer didn’t snap up it up.

While the standard demolition quotes were around $25,000, the couple
spent $38,000 to have a contractor trained by Mr. Reiff unpiece it over
six weeks last summer. They expect to come out even or better after
selling door hardware, windows, appliances and other components at a
salvage auction and reaping a tax deduction by donating the rest to a
reuse store.

“It was cleaner and quieter than demolition,” said Ms. Bronstein, an assistant professor of communication at DePaul University in Chicago. “We didn’t have dust flying everywhere.”

Usually, the real savings comes in the reconstruction phase. Paul
Pedini, the owner of the Big Dig House in Lexington, Mass., possibly
the country’s most celebrated recycled dwelling, estimates he shaved at
least $200,000 from his materials costs by using concrete on-ramps and
steel beams recovered from the Big Dig highway project in Boston for
his modernist structure.

“There were these materials and we wanted to build a house. We just
put two and two together,” said Mr. Pedini, a civil engineer who was a
contractor on the Big Dig. “I told them, why not keep the money you’d
pay in disposal costs and give the materials to us to reuse?”

Although few home builders have access to the remains of a $14.6
billion highway project, many cities now have “reuse” stores, which
sell salvaged goods — from wall sockets to vintage redwood floorboards
— for 50 to 75 percent off what similar products would cost if
purchased new.

There are about 1,000 such stores nationwide according to the Reuse
Association, most of them nonprofits that offer tax deductions in
exchange for donations of used housing materials. Habitat for Humanity
International, the affordable housing organization, runs 500 such shops
in 45 states, mostly selling easily recoverable accessories like
cabinets, doors and flooring. Unlike architectural salvage stores,
which sell marble fireplace mantels, stained glass and spiral
staircases, reuse stores generally traffic in mundane items like light
switches and insulation.

As with buying secondhand clothes, the challenge — and potential
charm — of reuse shopping is its unpredictability. Build it Green! NYC,
a reuse shop in Astoria, sells sets from nearby film studios alongside
items rescued from residential demolitions. Recently, $25 diner stools
from “The Knights of Prosperity,” a short-lived ABC show, were for sale
alongside $40 doors from “The Sopranos” and a set of cherry-finish
kitchen cabinets removed from an Upper East Side apartment. The
original owners paid $18,000 to buy and install the cabinets, according
to Justin Green, a founder of the store, who was asking $1,200 for the
set — top and bottom cabinets as well as counters.

“I love shopping there,” said Timothy Etienne of Garden City, N.Y. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

He has purchased windows, doors and paint at the store for a second
home upstate, along with a six-foot-tall wooden tepee ($30) that is now
a backyard playhouse for his four daughters.

Ms. Keller, meanwhile, has been combing the RE Store in Seattle for
months, trying to find secondhand glass blocks for the master bath in
her new 1,600-square-foot home. She recently scavenged a double-pane
glass door for her balcony and a cast-iron double sink for a craft
room.

To outfit a home this way, it helps to have a retiree’s schedule.

“You have to be patient,” Ms. Keller said. “It’s the thrill of the hunt that keeps me going back.”