Ken Ortiz has more work than he can handle. As the only certified deconstructionist in the midwest, he’d like nothing better than to train some competitors.
The house had been gutted and then some. Gone were the appliances, cabinets, trim, doors, and the never-sanded three-quarter-inch red oak tongue-and-groove flooring. (“We saved 95 percent of it,” says Ortiz.) An orderly forest of upright rough-cut two-by-fours remained to hold up the structure and define where the rooms had been. Overhead, long beams ran the full width of the house.
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Deconstruction is possible because there’s a market for this stuff, and at the high end it’s been around for a while. West Wilson was Ortiz’s fourth deconstructed house, but auctioneer Jodi Murphy of La Grange Park averages an auction a week in the metro area. Last year Murphy and Ortiz worked together on a Glencoe house built in 1950 and renovated in 1994. “After Jodi took out all the pretty stuff,” says Ortiz, “we removed two 48-foot semitrailers full of lumber and building materials.”
Some of these markets are nearby—locally deconstructed lumber has gone to Habitat for Humanity’s Restore in Elgin. Some are overseas. “We ship a tremendous amount of our product to Mexico, especially southern yellow pine,” says Reiff. Some high-end woods go to Japan—”They appreciate lumber; they don’t have any”—where they may turn up in cowboy-themed restaurants. Other destinations include Belize, Chile, the Philippines, and the Cook Islands. “We’re not in business to hold out for the highest dollar—we’ve got to do high volume.”
Last year the Taunton Press published Unbuilding, which Ortiz refers to as “the bible” for the budding industry. The authors are Bob Falk, a research engineer at the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, and Brad Guy, professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and president of the Building Materials Reuse Association. They call deconstruction “the ultimate green endeavor,” noting that in 1996 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that “the equivalent of 250,000 single-family homes are disposed of each year, which represents an estimated 1 billion-plus board feet of available salvageable structural lumber, or about 3 percent of our annual softwood timber harvest.” The book’s full of photos that somehow manage to make even half-deconstructed buildings look good. Its how-to tips begin with the elementary—”Remove something only when you are sure that it’s not supporting any other part of the building”—and move on to reminders that old two-by-fours may actually be two inches by four inches, and that there can be a big difference between a 14-foot-1-inch length of lumber (salable as a 14-footer) and a 13-foot-11-inch length (salable only as a 12-footer). Says research architect Thomas Napier of the Corps of Engineers’ Construction Engineering Research Laboratory in Champaign, “Our project people have their routine and rhythm, and there are a lot of skeptics who value low first cost. This book will help.”
Well-intended environmental regulations can create problems too. For instance, lead paint is a known health hazard and a common obstacle to deconstruction, but as Bob Falk told a class at the Chicago Center for Green Technology, regulation of it is “very confused.” Not only are the regulations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the EPA inconsistent with each other, none set standards for reuse of wood coated with lead-based paint. Falk and Guy take a preventive approach in Unbuilding, advising their readers to “avoid sanding, grinding, and sawing anything that’s… coated with lead paint,” and, if you can’t, to “do it outside, wash your hands afterward, and change your clothes so you don’t contaminate the people you come in contact with.” Long-term, of course, the answer is to design buildings so that they can be deconstructed with minimal cost and hassle.
