Papa Bear’s Guide to Acquiring Building Materials

Step I: Find a suitable donor structure.

This can be done any number of ways, but the most important thing is to keep your ears open. Derelict houses, barns, sheds, etc. are being demolished all the time. Occasionally owners of these candidates will offer their buildings for deconstruction; other times owners must be tracked down and persuaded. Get the word out that you are looking for deconstruction opportunities, and before you know it you may have more work than you know what to do with. It is in your best interests if the owner plans to bulldoze and bury the remains of a site after your reclamation efforts as is the case in this area. Being responsible for site clean-up is expensive and time consuming.

Two important factors to consider in your candidate are size and condition. Don’t get in over your head. Be sure it’s a project you can safely tackle. Careful inspection of the structure should give you some idea of what you will find underneath. Is the roof visibly damaged? If so, expect water damage in the framing below. Are the floors badly sloped? Sounds like the floor joists may be shot. Above all, consider how much of the materials will be useful to you before taking a project on. You don’t want to spend hours stripping a structure only to find there isn’t much of value underneath.

Step II: Prepare for demolition.

Safety first: you are going to be using all these tools in an enclosed space, so wear hearing protection. Expect debris and the occasional nail to come flying at you, so wear eye protection. Also you are going to be moving through the layers of decades of dust, insects and paint, often with lead, so a dust mask or respirator is often in order. Gloves help prevent blisters and many scraped knuckles.

Step III: Get to it already.

First a note: you can never be sure of what you will find in a place like this. Some things, like windows, sinks, countertops and cabinets, are easily removed and reused. Other treasures may abound as well; I’ve known pianos, treadle sewing machines, furniture, clothes, antique cameras and more to be discovered and taken home to a new life. Consider removing such items at the outset before demo debris makes it more challenging.

Now your tool bag is packed and the big day has come. Here it helps to have some understanding of the building process because the best way to take a building apart and not damage the material in the process is in the reverse order of its construction. If you don’t have building experience, don’t fret; demo is a great way to gain understanding of how buildings are put together.

Next, if there is tongue and groove flooring, clear one room entirely, and using the chainsaw, cut through both ends of all the boards as close to the wall as possible. Now grab a heavy hammer and bust up the first three or four floor boards along one wall. The only way to salvage tongue and groove is to pry from the tongue edge and you won’t know which way the flooring was laid until you bust some out. Also, you won’t have clearance for prying until you are a foot or so from the wall anyway. You may find kneepads helpful for this part—alternatively I have found it helpful to sit on a skateboard and roll from side to side as I pull the nails from each joist. Once the flooring is up, the joists are often exposed. The chainsaw is the quickest way to free those joists. With the flooring removed you have opened up a cavity in the house that is a convenient place to throw the detritus from the other rooms. Move through the house room by room in this fashion.

At this point you have done just about everything you need to do from inside the house. Let’s move outside and start ripping off siding. For the most part, you are going to find wood clapboards nailed to the outside of the walls. These were installed from the bottom of the wall to the top and can only be removed whole in the opposite order. However, since these clapboards are often lead painted and rarely reusable you may opt to break them off the wall any way you see fit. Once the siding is removed and you’ve cleared any insulation, you will most likely see one of two things: either the back side of interior lath-and-plaster walls or planks of sheathing. If it is the former, use your sledge to knock all that off the framing members into the hole left by the floor. If it is the latter, first pull the nails securing the sheathing, removing it from the top of the wall to the bottom, and then proceed with the sledge.

Rafters are exposed in a similar fashion, working from the outside in. Generally a flat pry bar is all you need to remove old asphalt shingles or the wooden shakes you occasionally find beneath them. Letting these materials just slide off the roof as you work is often the easiest thing, but beware this could easily mean nails sticking up out of the ground you will be working from. You may want to clean up as you go. As a general rule, you will want to keep any wood with nails sticking out of it as far from your feet as possible. As you remove wooden members you intend to keep, be sure to de-nail them as you go. Clean lumber stacks neatly and is easier and safer to handle.

Papa Bear's sketch of Larkspur

While you are up on the roof, go ahead and pry the rafters off the building. At the end of this step you are left with bare stud walls supporting joists and ceiling. Knock out the ceiling with the sledge hammer, a firm grip and sure footing. A ladder braced against the top of the wall can give you the position you will need to pry off the now-naked ceiling joists. Set up your ladder along the wall and hammer the top plate off the studs. The studs can be pried off the bottom plate, which can then be pried off the sill beams. If the sill beams are sound, the chainsaw can free them. Be sure to clear the debris from around the cut first.

Congratulations. Where there once was a house there is now a small debris field and many stacks of perfectly good materials. In order to fully recycle the structure all you need to do now is reassemble those materials in the form of a new structure. It will give you great pride to know so well the history of that wood.

March Hare Spring 2008 Issue 56

The Year of Mud		Dreams and Waking
Deconstruction 101		Profiles
Jan’s Autobiography

Come see our past issues for lots of Dancing Rabbit information.