Was just reading the wikipedia for Carrara Marble and it mentions that:
By the late 20th century Carrara’s highest-grade marble had run out; the considerable ongoing production is of stone with a greyish tint, or streaks of black or grey on white.
Given that there’s only a finite quantity of it left, it left me curious about attempts to preserve and reuse the existing stock.
I remember when I helped my parents with a (modest) remodel years ago, it was pretty distressing how everything was just smashed apart and thrown into giant dumpsters and hauled off to the dump. I get it, nobody has the time and labor costs to carefully disassemble things and store them and find new uses for them but it still felt bad watching so much perfectly usable material be destroyed.
But it made me curious, for remodels of higher end properties, where potentially a few hundred thousand or millions of dollars have gone into the original finishes, is there attempts to preserve and reuse any of that stuff or is it the same smash and dumpster process? There are probably tons of homes around the world with a high grade carrara marble bathroom or kitchen countertop, is that all just going into the same dumpster as everything else?
I know reclaimed lumber is a thing, how much of the lumber that could be reclaimed and has economic value actually is and how much is also destroyed? Apart from lumber, what else are people reclaiming? What’s the process for doing so for high end home remodels? Anyone have insight into that world of things?
Every once in a while, This Old House would make a road trip to a local re-claim shop, looking for stained glass panels, doorknobs, big old cast-iron bathtubs, what have you. The places were huge.
Our remodel wasn’t high-end as described in the OP, but the woman who cleans our house asked if she could have our old kitchen. Her family has a house here in Phoenix and another in Mexico. They took our cabinets and countertops and later sent us a pic of our old kitchen, reproduced in Mexico.
At the time I graduated from college, my department was going through some renovations, and had a bunch of big slabs (about 100 lbs) of polished granite that were going to just be thrown out, and were up for grabs for anyone who wanted them. My mom, who was coming to pick me up, considered taking a few, but in the end opted against hauling hundreds of pounds of stones across the width of a couple of states. I don’t know if anyone else ended up claiming them.
I have two piles of reclaimed and unused granite in my backyard. One pile is formed into the shape of an outdoor kitchen, and the other pile is stacked to minimize the ground area it takes up. I am now selecting between two 4x8’ slabs to use on a table top.
I also have several items from the local Habitat for Humanity outlet where they have a lot of materials reclaimed from high end remodels. I bought a couple of stainless steel sinks from them, one was never used. Most of what I’ve bought there are old tools, abandoned by homeowners, handymen, and contractors. They have plenty of kitchen counters and cabinets and lots of doors.
Countertops in particular are tough to re-use. They’re typically glued down, fragile, and custom sized. Cabinets, appliances, fixtures all are easy. As mentioned above, Habitat has used stores in many locations. I recycled an entire house once–moved it across town.
Around 2008, my downtown replaced the sewer system under the streets and as part of that, they repaved the existing asphalt streets with the original brick that was underneath. Some years later, a new hotel went up and part of that was placing some powerlines underground. A very large amount of the brick pavers was set aside on the construction site. Around the time the construction was ending, someone decided to start throwing that brick into a dumpster. The majority of the still good brick was not in the dumpster, but was underneath a giant pile of sand for some reason. So I got a friend to help me raid the dumpster and now I have a nice sand-set brick walkway from my porch to the driveway. It’s amazing how many bricks it takes to make even a small feature. I hope to use the remaining brick for a nice mailbox post.
Not exactly responsive to the OP, but our town has many teardowns, and it always distresses me to see the entire house just tossed into dumpsters. Yeah, I know there would be liability issue to having people deconstruct a home for re-use, and building code issues for incorporating “used” materials, but when you see images of shanty villages elsewhere, it really brings home how wasteful we are.
My sister often digs up plants from homes scheduled for demolition and plants them in her gardens. You know they are going to just get trashed. I often kid her that I expect to see her listed in the local “Police Blotter”!
Before we moved to our present location, the house we were renting had a vacant (overgrown) lot next door. One day, here comes the crew to build a new home. The landscape guys unfortunately took out a couple good size trees which would have been perfect for a backyard and were battling a hawk family to do so — of course, they won. Lastly, they took out the palm tree from the front yard. As if! It was about fifteen feet tall and chunky (not one of those scrawny trees you see blowing over in hurricane vids). It was in the almost perfect spot for a palm tree: one of the street corners, where even if it blew over in a typhoon it wouldn’t damage any houses or power lines. Plus, to have one of those installed (This was Florida — a palm tree in the front yard is a state law) would be probably $6K minimum. When the new neighbor moved in, we got chatty over the back fence where I filled him in on his house when it was a lot. I mentioned the palm tree and I thought he was going to cry and I wasn’t far behind. What a friggin’ waste!
Asked this question of my traveling companion who is a top-end interior designer.
Her reply: In the State of California you must recycle at least 50% of the items you take out of the home during the remodel. If you are a professional contractor, you do this as a matter of course. She scored a very lightly used Miele dishwasher because of this.
ETA: 65% if you adopt the Cal Green building code.
First-cut lumber is highly sought after by woodworkers. It’s finer grained, harder and fully dried. Any problems are superficial and easily sanded out (as with most wood). I used to rescue water-damaged chairs and refurbish them. What most people see as something ruined is in fact perfectly viable with a bit of elbow grease.
Oh wow, I had no idea. Fascinated to know more about how that works in practice.
Yeah. exactly, same here. It gives me joy to see examples from this thread of people saving stuff for reuse, especially an entire kitchen carted off to Mexico! The way it’s done now just feels so thoughtless.
Oh, it could be so much worse. The year my mom retired from teaching was also the last year for that school building. The district posted guards at the building, to ensure that no teachers could take any supplies out of the building before it was torn down. The school library was demolished with all of the books still in it. And, that summer, they installed new windows in the never-again-to-be-used, about-to-be-demolished building, because hey, they had already contracted for them, nothing they could do about that now.
There’s a show called Rehab Addict that takes place in Detroit where a woman buys old homes and restores them. She’s always going to a warehouse to buy reclaimed vintage doors, windows, shutters, columns, light fixtures, door knobs, hinges, tile, marble and wood. One time she even got a humongous bar. She also has her own storage on her own property.
The stuff she buys seems to be wildly expensive to me (like a door for $3000 or something) but you gotta assume there is a lot of storage and labor costs that go in to getting and keeping and catalogging this stuff. I’d assume the actual costs of the items they source are minimal.
Around here it’s not unusual for people to take out their kitchen cabinets and put them up for sale or free online. Especially if the people getting the new cabinets are DIYing and don’t have to pay someone to gingerly take out the cabinets.
My cabinets in my garage were way nicer and newer than the ones in my kitchen for a while, because I got them from friends who were remodeling their kitchen. My kitchen cabinets were from the 60s and the ones I got for the garage are probably from the early 2000s. Eventually I re-did my kitchen with nice stuff, and was able to pass on a couple of my old old cabinets to a friend for his garage.
It makes me crazy to see stuff that someone might want thrown away. As has been stated, the trouble and expense to store the stuff and find an interested owner just isn’t worth it.
I live in a neighborhood of tract homes built in the early 60s. I still had the original kitchen cabinets in it when I remodeled last year. The guy across the street inherited his house from his late parents and most of the inside was still original. Our kitchens were the same design. His dad apparently did a horrible job trying to stain his cabinets and my neighbor was thrilled to get my cabinet doors and drawers.
Last month I replaced my gas furnace with a heat pump. The furnace was a nice one and was twelve years old so it still had a lot of life in it. I was horrified to find out that they were just going to throw away the old one. I put an ad on the Craigslist free stuff section and got four responses in a couple of hours. The dude literally was in tears with gratitude. I have a similar story from many years back when I replaced my washer and dryer. They went to a woman in her 70s who had never had her own washer/dryer in her life.
The same thing happened when the replaced the couches and chairs in the dorm where I lived on campus in the 80s. So many students could have used the free furniture. I kind of get it. It was much easier to cordon off an area and throw the furniture off of the balconies (three story building) than to carry them down the stairs but still.
Not a house remodel, but many years ago when an office I was working in was remodeling and was going to throw out two glass-front barrister bookcases, the kind that are made in one-shelf segments. I got permission to take them and hauled home both bookcases, one segment at a time since I had to hand-carry them from downtown Boston to the North End. Decades later, they’re sitting here in my living room, stuffed with books.
