Home & Garden...

Building a homes with a lot of reclaimed materials sounds cool - if you can find the goods. Luckily, locating material for reuse in home remodeling or home builidng is not that difficult. What's hard is the time it takes to find the right materials for your home projects - be it building anew, or simply adding on to an already standing home. There's a lot to choose from in relation to reclamied materials, so make an initial plan about the items you need, i.e. "Door" and be flexible with your imagination.

Now where to look...

1. Habitat ReStores: ReStores are shops that sell nice quality used building supplies and other home project materials. Their prices are higher up on the resale market but much lower than supplies you'd buy new. Proceeds from ReStores help build Habitat houses within a given community, which is a bonus of shopping there. I love the ReStore shops I've been in. The materials are usually very high quality and unique.

2. The Building Materials Reuse Association (BMRA): sThis non-profit is an educational resource for those interested in deconstruction and the reuse plus recycling of recovered building materials. They offer a handy directory of reuse stores at their website.

3. Deconstruction companies: You can contact companies locally and learn about sales they may be having of salvaged building materials.

4. The Reclaimed Wood Council: This organization can giveyou all the basics about reclaimed wood and hook you up with real reclaimed wood specilaity companies.

5. Your basic salvage shop, thrift store, antique dealer, garage sale, and more: Any place that sells used goods has the potential to sell something you might want to use for your house. These places won't of course sell floor planks or a ton of scrap metal, but they may very well have cubboards, sinks, tubs, and more up for grabs. Just be careful of quality at places like these.

6. Cheap stuff: Online resources like Freecycle and Craigslist have made it super cheap to find almost anything you need. One issue here is quality and another is safety. Never allow folks to bring a "deal" to your home. Meet up in public, with a pal tagging along. However, you can score some pretty decent stuff.

7. Free stuff!: Dumpster diving, asking friends, looking around a junk yard and colleges with building programs all may offer free and usable goods. Some junk yards charge for items some don't you'll have to check around. The downside waiting around and searching for the perfect product of course takes a lot of time. The up side; well, it is free.

There are plenty of other places you can score reused or recycled materials for home building purposes. I'm sure this is a topic we'll re-visit.