It’s indicative of the process of stumbling your way through a green building project.  You find out after you’ve done something that there’s a name for what you did!  While I think our home is truly a “sustainably developed” building project and is truly “green,” apparently what we really did was a “deconstruction” project.

There are two very basic ideas which Lisa and I felt we would need to keep as guiding principals in order to do this rehab on the tiny budget which we had.  The first is that we would be compressing our lives.  Live and work in the same building, shop locally, participate fully in our local economy and try to get the hell out of our car and get into living here.  The second is that we would reuse whatever we could from the previous building.  Seems to me a very huge version of reuse/recycle but apparently it’s called “deconstruction.”

In our case we kept the basic structure of the old building (brick shell) and reused 1 to 1 all of the bricks which were removed in other places where walls were replaced.  We are remaking all of the doors for reinstalling throughout the place.  The floor joist are being remade into stairs, the hardwood floors were removed, stored and reinstalled in the new place.  Kitchen cabinets from both of the old kitchens have found their way into the new place as a kitchen and an amazing storage area across from our laundry room.  There’s a big list-- reusing the wood from our back porch for a deck atop our garage, reusing appliances from the old building, reusing bathroom fixtures and shelving, making shelving out of old wood from the previous construction, handrails made of ceiling joists, shelves and built ins made of reused finish plywood from the old place, tongue and groove plywood from the old subfloor reused, windows reused, etc.  Look at us-- we’re deconstructionists!