Material re-use
PORCH RENOVATION
Although this topic goes hand-in-hand with demolition, I decided to separate it out because it’s a topic that’s important to me. We like to try to salvage anything that can be re-used - often times we don’t exactly know what we would re-use it for.
Here’s my take on this - materials these days are expensive and if we’re talking wood, new wood is often of lesser quality than wood from the past. So, if you have a building made of material from the past, before sending it to the dump - it may be worth giving thought to what is re-usable. Beyond the possible direct economic and qualitative benefits, re-use can help save resources and reduce your carbon footprint by saving transportation emissions - both of which are good for our planet!
Disposal
With all that being said, there are scenarios where things are just not salvageable – this deck for example, has aged beyond the expected lifespan of its materials, cedar and redwood. Given its age and exterior exposure, it’s no surprise that most of the wood was rotted/damaged beyond salvage. So, I’ll talk about what we did with all this unusable lumber:
In a previous project, we hired a hauler to pick up the old, rotted wood that couldn’t be salvaged. They came, stacked it in their truck and took it away. It was super convenient but as you might expect, convenience came at a higher cost than doing it ourselves. So, when it came time to clean up the unusable wood for this project, we decided to save a little and rented a Utility Trailer, hitched it to an SUV, loaded it up and took it to the dump ourselves. It’s obviously a lot more work and labor intensive but it was about 40% of the cost of having someone else do it.
To give you an idea of what we were able to salvage, there were some larger custom cut timbers that were used for stair treads and bench tops that were (with a good amount of clean up) salvageable. We also saved all the bolts that were fastening the guard rail posts.