We’ve posted a number of photo updates with comments and notes.

There was a minor amount of soft-stripping done last week, but today, the demolition began in earnest.

Some of these include:

• Habitat For Humanity ReStore specializes in surplus building materials, mostly new and in immediately reusable condition. This was somewhere good to take hardware and tools that we had inside the house and had no need for but that someone could use. However, they’re not in the salvage business. That is, it’s the place to take what’s left over from a job you just finished, or to take something that is too new to throw away but which for some reason you’re getting rid of. (It’s also a great place to buy materials for set construction.)
• Community Forklift specializes in reclaimed and surplus building materials. Their warehouse also functions as a home improvement store of sorts for people who want to get good renovation supplies at a fraction of the cost if they’re willing to deal with some dings or putting in some elbow grease. They’re a non-profit, so they make every effort to sell below market price and function on volunteers to keep stuff out of landfills. We took a number of soft-strip materials (kitchen sink, shelving, hardware, paint supplies) as a donation, which RC will be able to take as a write-off on his taxes. They also do pickups if the volume of stuff is large enough. It’s a great place to find a used stove, or a large slab of surplus granite, or random 1950s and 1960s sinks and toilets.
• The Brass Knob is a for-profit venture. They buy pretty stuff from old Victorian townhomes in DC and resell it at a profit, the idea being that most people just want to get rid of those big ole doors or mantelpieces and would rather sell them than give them away. We haven’t sold anything to them yet, chances are we probably won’t, since the soft real estate market has been affecting them like it has everyone (affecting their ability to buy stuff). But they provide a great way to not throw perfectly good things away and perhaps make some money at it if it’s substantial.
• Second Chance Architectural Salvage is basically what you get if you married Community Forklift and Brass Knob — a place that takes beautiful usable stuff from old houses and resells it to fund job training programs in house renovation and woodworking in Philadelphia, Washington DC and Baltimore. They will also sell larger items on consignment, the fees from which help provide additional funding. So it’s helping three times around — by saving perfectly good materials, by helping the community, and by helping us keep our budget in line by perhaps getting a good sale value on some items rather than the donation tax deduction.

It’s a tough question. I could imagine living in a Victorian house, and RC would like it, but the reality is that to make things look like they’re proper for the period is expensive. Not only that, but given that it had bad renovation work done years ago, there’s not all that much Victorian there — some fixtures and such. So between bad cabinetry, tiny sinks, inefficient toilets and old wiring, the changes needed are substantial. In that front, keeping Victorian fixtures and finishes doesn’t make sense, because we’d have to go all victorian everywhere — which is both expensive, labor intensive, a pain to maintain and also is not really something we find particularly attractive.

But it means we’re creating waste — so that we can have water-efficient toilets, walls with better insulation, actual non-leaky windows, a water heater that isn’t running all the time, and so that we can live in a house that we consider not just a house but a Very Cool Home.

So we have to focus on a three-prong approach:

• Reuse what it makes sense to reuse, either in the house or through a reuse center
• Recycle what can be recycled
• Reduce the amount of waste generated through the construction