Although I often encounter things that I’ve never seen before when inspecting houses, it’s rare that I’m just blown away by what an owner has done.  Reuse of building materials may be more common in some areas of the country, but it’s still a relatively scarce practice here in Central Florida.  The house in the photo started life in 1930 as a simple rural farm house. In 2007, it was moved to it’s current location on 10 acres and is still a work in progress.  The walls were stripped down to the studs inside and out and it was completely modernized in the rebuilding process.  All new electrical, heating and air conditioning, and plumbing was installed as is common and necessary in this type of job.  Not only were properly constructed pier’s added for a foundation with tie downs to meet current wind standards, the roof was also braced and strapped in accordance with today’s standards.

What sets this home apart is that the owner has been collecting salvaged pine boards from barns, homes and commercial buildings for several years.  This salvaged lumber which is pretty much unavailable these days was all milled and cut to order and the entire interior of the home including ceilings is solid heart pine.  No drywall was used, no new lumber, just salvaged material.  The impact was further enhance by the fact that there was no finish on the wood, just the natural color and that faint pine scent.  All materials were obtained locally and all work was done at local mills and shops.

This is a case where the owners did not set out to “do something green” but just to do the right thing!  They didn’t read a book, or hunt online for inspiration, it was all just common sense to them.  Granted, it does take some special conditions and resources to pull something like this off, but by looking for the opportunities, you may be surprised by what presents itself.

I’d be interested in hearing any stories that you have about the reuse of existing materials.  Please leave a comment!

Take a look around your closets at home and what do you see the most of?  Hopefully not those ’70’s disco clothes and shoes you’re still holding onto!  The most common item found in most closets is the wire coat hanger. The Organic Consumers Association estimates that 3.5 billion wire hangers are used each year by the dry cleaning industry alone. As these are generally made of steel, this amounts to 195 million pounds of steel used for production.  Since steel is one of the more easily recycled products, you would think that there was a happy answer here, but the hanger network estimates that about 3.5 Billion hangers end up in the landfill each year.  That’s about 60,000 cars!  Wire hangers also take about 100 years to decompose in the landfill.  So what can we do? Read More

A variation of Parkinson’s law has to be that “stuff expands to fill all available space. Have you ever noticed that you move out of a small place into a bigger place and wonder how you’ll ever fill up the empty house? The next thing you know, you can’t find storage space for that latest “must have” item you brought home from the store. What to do then? Well, since there seems to be a proliferation of Self-storage facilities, that must be the answer.  Or just throw it away and let it end up in the landfill.

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