Project Background 2 - Summer 2006 Deconstruction, Recycling and Salvage

Since our project was on hold, we took advantage of an offer to do some deconstruction and materials recycling on a large house that was getting torn down. We spent a good chunk of the summer pulling exterior siding and trim from the house and some miscellaneous interior trim and baseboard. In addition, we moved a 10’ x 12’ shed almost 15 miles from that property to ours.

The siding is beautiful 12” beveled cedar siding. As you can see, the only downfall is the color! We’d love to get it back to natural cedar, but we need to do some research to see if sandblasting (someone has suggested using corn instead of sand) is realistic. If not, we’re going to have to resort to painting it.

The shed has literally changed our life allowing us to store bikes and other gear we had been forced to share our bedroom and living room with for the last few years. The moving project was quite the experience. Thanks to our friend, Scoop, that had a truck and trailer big enough to haul it and was willing to get up early one morning to do the slow drive towing the shed.

While all this deconstruction was going on, our local school was holding a surplus sale. They were in the process of finishing construction on a new middle and high school and were selling off all the interior furnishings from the old schools. We picked up a hodge-podge of stuff from lockers (what a great way to store skis and misc gear) to glass front cabinets. Who knows how or if these will fit into our project, but we went ahead and bought them figuring we’d probably be having a surplus sale of our own after all this was over.

At this point we should say “Thanks!” to our friend, Sue, who has graciously stored all of our building materials in her garage for the last year. We definitely would have had to really pick and choose if it hadn’t been for her loaning us her extra space.