Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Dear Tree-Huggers,

I don't know if I've shared this with you yet, but our goal with this house is to move in by June.  Well, fingers crossed!  But since we're still waiting on our building permit, it may be a fairly ambitious goal.  Time will tell whether it's TOO ambitious:

Demo:  See how they raze that roof.

In the meantime, I'll be posting about the demo process.  Since we bought a house that was designed in the seventies to the standards of a party-house-cum-ski-chalet (think Hugh Heffner goes skiing in the swiss alps), we have decided to demolish most of it and start again.

But here's the rub:  Demolishing a house with a wrecking ball and dumpster would result in a huge amount of trash, and putting stuff in landfills is really bad for the planet.  In fact, construction waste accounts for approximately 40% of consumer waste in our landfills.  That's too much by anyone's standards.

So, to square this project with our sustainable ethos, most of our old house is going to have a second life in someone else's project.  We are doing good, and also doing well (because we get a nifty tax credit out of it).  To accomplish this gorgeous act of re-incarnative sleight-of-hand, we've engaged the Daniel Salmon from The ReUse People.  They're good people, the ReUse people.

Daniel and his team will take the house apart, piece by piece, and donate it to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore.  The bits that can't be salvaged will end up in a dumpster, but that's only a small percentage of the overall.

Panoramic view - the upstairs rooms (before they're removed completely)

So each day when I drive by, the house is less and less of itself.  First, the finishes got taken out.  The furniture, the artwork, the odd and dated kitchen crockery, and the mirrors packed up and hauled away.  Next, the cabinets, the light fixtures, and the plumbing fixtures, got taken down and hauled away.  Then they took out the boiler, the furnaces, the laundry machines, and the pool heater.  Finally, they took each piece of wooden trim away from the windows and doors.

When the first layer of re-usable stuff was taken out, they rolled up the carpets and peeled back the sheetrock.  That stuff got tossed into a dumpster - I guess one can't reuse it no matter how much one wishes to.  Then they stripped out the wiring and the plumbing - any metal or plastic was sent to the recycling center.  The wooden studs were removed, nails taken out, and the 2x4's stacked for reuse.  The windows were removed carefully and stacked against a wall.  The fireplaces in the upstairs bedrooms had their fascias removed and were taken out whole - destined to heat another's home.

And then they went to work on the roof.  They brought in a genie, and started pulling off the shingles.  As for the decking - who knows?  It's pretty old and rotten.  At the moment, they still haven't started deconstructing the pool or the huge fireplace in the living room - those are going to take special attention, I would imagine.  And so it goes.

And then ... the indoor pool.  Welp, that bad boy didn't even fit through the door, so:

It's like, hot tub sized!  But destined for the dumpster.

We have a meeting with the builder and the architect tomorrow - perhaps we'll have the building permit by then!

Greenly Yours,

Parker