Home Deconstruction Basics

jchait — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:36:23 -0400

Deconstruction is one alternative to demolition and land filling. You can use deconstruction if you're remodeling part of a home, or tearing down an entire home. The focus of deconstruction is to salvage materials for reuse and recycle.

Think about it - if you bulldoze a home right over, you lose all possibility of reusing the home's material. Plus in some cases you can ruin something so much that it can't even be recycled anymore. If you deconstruct a home, you basically take it apart in reverse order of how it was built.

According to the Deconstruction Institute:

"Statistics show that the demolition of buildings in the United States produces 124,670,000 tons of debris each year. That’s enough to build a wall about 30 feet high and 30 feet thick around the entire coast of the continental United States (4,993 miles)."

The con is it takes more time (obviously). That said, there are many pros to home deconstruction.

You salvage fairly obvious items like sinks, fireplaces, windows, and also obscure items like joists, shingles, wood planks, and more. If it’s asbestos free and not drywall it can be reused.
You save money by reusing or selling items or you can donate the items to a cause. If you donate you can claim it on your taxes – which covers the cost of deconstruction which is a little more than plain old demolishing.
You’re conserving resources that would need to be remade new.
You’re keeping items out of landfills.

The Deconstruction Institute offers a handy calculator that figures out what the benefits of home deconstruction are for a home of your size. You enter in your home's square ft. and you get facts based on that size of a home.