Mining architecture for spare parts

Aug. 12--Buffalo's supply of empty old Victorian houses, broken-down bungalows and closed factories is not blight to some, but wealth lying in wait.

Local treasure hunters are part of a growing national interest in "deconstruction" -- the salvaging, dismantling and reselling of old building parts.

One Niagara Falls man salvages factory beams made of dense oldgrowth pine that can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. In Buffalo, a new nonprofit store called "Buffalo ReUse" sells a range of salvaged items, such as solid pine paneled doors, oak flooring and old-fashioned soaker tubs.

"I feel like we're taking advantage of an urgent need," said Buffalo Re- Use executive director Michael Gainer, who has collected some $250,000 in grant money to hire staff and develop his nonprofit. His plans include taking down some of the city's empty houses, many on the East Side, and training people who need jobs how to do deconstruction work.

Deconstruction experts say national interest in leftover pieces of old houses and buildings made with rare ingredients and style has been growing in recent years. It fits with concern about the environmental cost of producing new things, teeming landfills and new reverence for the old. California found that construction debris is the third-largest part of the state's annual 92 million tons of garbage.

"A lot of it is this appreciation for what is thrown away," said Brad Guy, author of "Unbuilding: Salvaging the Architectural Treasures of Unwanted Houses" (Taunton Press). "There's just a lot of neat stuff that's out there."

A survey by Guy, who is also president of the Pennsylvania-based Building Materials Reuse Association, found that "used flooring" is one of the fastest growing retail categories.

The reuse movement is small but growing. Guy has 1,000 members listed on the BMRA Web site and sees evidence of new interest in the spike in attendance at the reuse association conference -- 170 this year compared to 50 five years ago. "There's so much being demolished in older cities," he said. "We've just kind of run out of some forest resource."

Homeowners say they like the looks of old stuff, and the way saving it makes them feel.

"We're buying materials wherever we think they'll fit in," said Bill Wolski, who figured he has saved $5,000 by spending $1,010 on a cast-iron tub, a medical-lab sink with a foot pedal and carved oak railings from Buffalo ReUse.

By the time he buys old flooring from the store at $1.50 a square foot instead of $6.50, he will add another $10,000 to his savings total.

"We're trying to build some instant history . . . We feel there's a certain energy we'll get by using 100- year-old houses that are being demolished," Kenmore native Wolski said of the good vibes he expects from the house he and his girlfriend, Melanie Carpenter of Toronto, are preparing to build in Colden.

For now, the couple lives in Boston, Mass. When they began working with an architect to design what will be a retirement house, Carpenter searched online for building materials and found Buffalo ReUse. "She couldn't sit down," Wolski said. "She'd say, 'Oh, look at this. Look at what I've found!' "

Interest from homeowners such as Wolski and Carpenter has contributed to an emerging nonprofit economic model: Nonprofits take on the job of deconstruction and open Home-Depot-like warehouses of used materials. A growing number of deconstruction related organizations have nonprofit status, such as Buffalo ReUse. Guy estimated that some 60 percent of last year's reuse association conference attendees were nonprofits.

David Bennink, a Washington state deconstruction consultant working with Buffalo ReUse, has been getting a call a week for help -- twice what he was getting three years ago. He has clients in 20 states. He figures he has dismantled and saved 350 full structures and salvaged materials from another 3,000 that were demolished or remodeled.