Recycled structures

Anyone driving along U.S. Highway 78 last month might have noticed the house at 405 W. 5th North St. in Summerville slowly vanish. First, the top floor, then the bottom. Eventually, all that was left was the brick chimney. Then it disappeared, too.

Now, nobody panic. That's what was supposed to happen. A new local nonprofit enterprise, Sustainable Warehouse, took the 83-year-old house apart, 2 x 6 by 2 x 6, nail by nail, shingle by shingle. It took less than four weeks, with a crew of five workers including executive director Rebecca O'Brien, assistant Andrea Santos and supervisor Walter Anderson.

The home was not historic or treasured to the point of preservation, and couldn't be used for the future purpose of the site as a dentist's office.

Yet by taking the house down in a procedure know as "deconstruction," most of the structure was saved and can be sold.

And the house isn't demolished in the traditional fashion, in which case little or none of the building materials can be recouped.

"The house is taken down to the ground," says O'Brien, who helped start up the venture less than a year ago. By carefully protecting its parts, about 75 percent of the structure can be recycled: siding, trim, bricks and fixtures such as bathtubs and brass plates, she says. Most all of the wood is saved.

"It's all good wood," she says. "The other (less appealing) option would be a bulldozer. (Debris would be) put in a dumpster, landfill."

As it turned out, some of the wood that the crew originally thought would be preserved had to be dumped because it had rotted.

"Every building is different," says Santos, as she laboriously pulled nails from a deck in good shape, using only the claw part of the hammer.

The Summerville house is the first full deconstruction for Sustainable Warehouse, although it has been involved in recycling projects before.

Fixtures and accessories from the Old Cigar Factory on East Bay Street were donated to the group. A developer is converting the space, which held offices and Johnson & Wales culinary school, into high-end lofts.

Sustainable Warehouse, a nonprofit organization working with its sister business, Sustainable Deconstruction, sold the collection to nonprofit groups and others.

In a typical job such as the two-story Summerville home, construction crews start at the top and work down, dismantling along the way. They began by pulling off shingles. Next they focused on the interior, starting in an upper corner and removing crown molding. Ceiling joists are taken apart, and the walls were lowered.

Deconstruction is hardly exclusive to the Charleston area. But the business is still something of a cottage industry. O'Brien, for instance, scoured the Internet before finding a hydraulic nail remover online via a Denver entrepreneur.

"We got the first version," she says.

That's sped up the process, at least in getting the wood in shape for sale.

All the while, Sustainable Warehouse is lining up customers. Wood on the Summerville house is going to a buyer in Beaufort. Purchasers can get tax deductions by donating reclaimed materials to nonprofit groups such as Habitat for Humanity's ReStore. And builders can receive credits via the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design by reusing salvaged items.

"We hope to sell as much out of here as possible," O'Brien says.

Sustainable Warehouse recently completed the Summerville job and is now working on a small project in Mount Pleasant. Meanwhile, it's still looking for a permanent warehouse to store materials before they are shipped to buyers.

O'Brien says the crew, by dismantling the Summerville home in an orderly fashion and finding materials' purchasers, proved "it's a doable process and there is a need for used materials."

For more information, visit www.sustainablewarehouse.org, e-mail O'Brien at rebecca@sustainablewarehouse.org or call 532-9351.

Reach Jim Parker at 937-5542 or jparker@postandcourier.com.