The author, Derek “Deek” Diedricksen, is a scrappy young guy who took his love for kid forts and turned it into a deep study of [...]]]>

The book Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts: And Whatever the Heck Else We Could Squeeze in Here is a cross between Malcolm Wells and redneck literature.

The author, Derek “Deek” Diedricksen, is a scrappy young guy who took his love for kid forts and turned it into a deep study of how to build tiny shelters on a budget.

The book is full of scribbles and rambles (very much along the humor and style of Malcolm Wells) on how to build your own back yard or forest hideaway.

As a New York green contractor I appreciate his creativity among all else. At Eco Brooklyn sure we eco-renovate New Yorkers’ homes and commercial spaces but what we really do is find creative ways to re-purpose garbage.

We come across a dumpster and we’re like, “Here is a cool piece of garbage, how can we turn it into something useful? I know! Lets make a counter out of it!”

And the next thing you know we are putting it into a two million dollar brownstone and making it look like a million bucks. You can’t buy that at a store.

The NYCMEDP runs a number of ongoing service, outreach, and research programs.  The NYC Waste Match, for example, is [...]]]>

Eco Brooklyn has partnered up with the NYC Materials Exchange Development Program, a great non-profit that keeps reusable materials out of the trash by connecting people with unwanted materials to others who can reuse them.

The NYCMEDP runs a number of ongoing service, outreach, and research programs.  The NYC Waste Match, for example, is a free service that can help green builders salvage materials efficiently by connecting us directly with businesses and individuals doing demolition and construction.  Waste Match also helps these people save money on disposal costs while building an environmentally friendly image.  Salvage is a win-win situation, and we hope that more people will choose to reuse materials now that the NYCMEDP is providing an easy way to do it.

Check out our member page on their site!

Earthship building is best for non-urban parts of the [...]]]>

The two best building systems I know of right now are the Earthship and Passive House methods. Right now Eco Brooklyn is lucky enough to be involved in two jobs that involve both systems, one a NY earthship and the other a NY Passive House.

Earthship building is best for non-urban parts of the world. The footprint of the Earthship makes it prohibitive for city buildings. And as the name implies, Earthships don’t work for buildings more than two stories high. An Earthship relies on the temperature of the earth and thus needs to be nestled in the earth to work.

An Earthship building Eco Brooklyn is currently involved in on the Lower East Side of Manhattan

Passive House building is a good choice for city buildings. Here in NY there are many Passive House jobs going on and I predict that Passive House will become the standard for city, multy level buildings.

The one flaw with Passive House is that even if the whole world built by Passive House standards we would still have wars over resources. This is because Passive House is all about energy efficiency but does not focus on reducing embodied energy in the construction phase. The reasoning is that over the life of the building a Passive House saves so much energy that the initial consumption of high embodied energy – insulation, windows etc – is justified.

I don’t think we have that luxury. That is why our Passive House house in Manhattan is built with almost 100% salvaged materials.

For me salvaged materials is the answer, especially in the city. In the countryside, a place conducive to Earthship building, there is very little salvaged materials available. Lucky for the Earthship, you basically only need vehicle tires as a salvaged material. The second most needed material for an Earthship is, duh, earth, which is plentiful on our planet. After that you need some wood, some cement, some glass and some plumbing and electric materials.

These are things you can salvage but they are not needed in abundance so even buying them new isn’t going to burden the planet hugely.

In the city you have a whole different story. The city is full of very valuable trash. Here in NY I know for a fact that you can build a luxury condo with the trash that is thrown away from the job sites of other, uh, luxury condos. I know because that is what we did for our Manhattan Passive House three family building.

NY may be the elite of valuable trash, but every city is full of good garbage. Right now it is legal to throw that garbage away and it shouldn’t be. The NY DOB should have a team of people inspecting peoples’ dumpsters. If it has old wood, insulation, bricks, cinder block, and windows the contractor should be fined a hefty sum.

Why are contractors paying good money to throw away good materials?

The reason is simple economics. It costs less to throw it away and buy it when you need it than store it until you need it. This is a capitalistic flaw not a moral one.

The solution for cities across the globe is a top down program that subsidizes the extraction and storage of valuable materials instead of throwing them out. It would work very much like current city recycling programs work. When a contractor needs materials they would have the choice to go to a storage area and buy salvaged materials. The material is there, the demand is there. The only thing lacking is a restructuring of how things are done.

Here at Eco Brooklyn, being a NY green contractor, we don’t do that many Earthships despite our deep respect for the system and for Jonah and Michael Reynolds the founders of Earthship building.

But we do Passive Houses. We solve the problem of Passive House high embodied energy by salvaging as much as physically possible. To do this we have a storage area where we put the wood, insulation and other items needed to build NY brownstone.

A Passive House job Eco Brooklyn is building in Manhattan

When the job comes we pull whatever we need from the storage area. The way we make it work financially, since storage is not cheap, is we get the stuff from dumpsters or at half price from other contractros looking to get rid of overstock.

When you factor in labor to collect and clean up the salvaged materials we may not be getting the stuff any cheaper than what you pay at the store, but for us that is good enough. Same price, zero embodied energy, zero mountains clear cut, zero rivers polluted. Sounds like a great deal to us.

That is the problem with current building. They all build on credit. The hidden costs of badly paid workers and ecological destruction across the globe is not factored in when you buy a 2×4 at the hardware store. Our future generations will pay for that dearly.

The goal of Eco Brooklyn is to build with cash, symbolically speaking. When we salvage a 2×4 from a dumpster no tree was cut down for us using it, no worker was badly paid, no ecology across the planet was destroyed. So what if it costs us a little more than a new piece of wood when you factor in labor and storage. Hell, if we factored in all the hidden costs that 2×4 should cost ten times what it does. If our labor to collect and repair the salvaged 2×4 costs the same as a new one we feel we have gotten the deal of a lifetime.

We ar Eco Brooklyn feel that for NY building a combination of 100% salvaged materials and Passive House techniques is by far the best way to build.

Unfortunately most contractors can not build this way because they do no have the infrastructure of salvage that Eco Brooklyn has. We have a team of guys devoted to dumpster diving and a network of contractors who know to call us if they have valuable garbage to give away.

But hopefully this will change as the city gets more hip to the importance of salvaging the valuable NY construction garbage. Contractors don’t feel good about throwing away 100 year old hard wood beams, but what can they do? They are not educated to the importance of saving it and they don’t have the storage.

This is where the city can help. With time hopefully they will.

For now Eco Brooklyn continues in what we call guerrilla construction – dumpster diving and contractor connection – a grass roots solution to a deep seated need.

The first job was to remove some paint that a previous owner, in their infinite and unfathomable intelligence, had painted [...]]]>

We did two jobs over the past week on wood floors. They started out really ugly. And they ended up amazing. We finished them with 100% pure tung oil so they are really natural.

The first job was to remove some paint that a previous owner, in their infinite and unfathomable intelligence, had painted over the floors. Why they did this we have no idea. But they did such a good job that we also had no idea what was below the paint.

We suspected something great though.

First we sanded off the paint after determining it had no lead in it. We used a large belt sander. Then we got on our hands and knees and carefully sanded with a hand sander. Below you can see already that the floor was once amazing. it was white oak with mahogany inlay.

Once we had gotten all the paint off and sanded the old floor to a smooth finish we seeped it in pure tung oil mixed with citrus solvent so that the oil really soaked in. Tung oil needs to be applied in the right amounts so it doesn’t create an oily film on the wood. If done right it seeps in nicely and hardens the wood from within. It creates a long lasting finish that actually beautifies the actual wood.

This is different from varnish you apply on top of the wood. Varnish, the most common being polyurethane from petrochemicals, creates a hard surface on top of the wood but does not actually seep into the wood. It is basically clear paint. Over time the varnish wears off and the wood looks sad. Tung oil on the other hand can’t wear off since it is part of the wood.

Over time the tung oil cured wood only gets richer. And unlike varnish that needs to be sanded off if you want to refinish it, tung oil doesn’t need sanding. You simply add more tung oil to the wood to refresh it or heal a wound in the wood.

The client had wanted a natural floor installer and finisher because she had gotten cancer in the past and wanted to stay away from the toxic fumes of conventional wood applications. We were happy to oblige.

The end result was a previously beautiful wood floor brought back naturally.

================

The other job we did was in a gut renovation we are doing of a brownstone. The existing floors were unusable. First was a layer of linoleum:

Under the linoleum were sad planks of flooring.  They were too badly rotted so we had to rip them out. Below that were some weary subfloors. As you can see from the picture below the subfloor didn’t look like much. It just looked like tired old wood not worth saving.

Most contractors would never use it and would cover it with new flooring. But we knew better. The house was built in 1903 and had the original subfloors – soft white pine. Adding tung oil to soft white pine is a magic mix since you get the beauty of the pine plus the subtle hardening effect of tung oil.

We also refuse to buy new wood for anything. Not one tree has been cut down from Eco Brooklyn’s building.

First we sanded it and then we applied several coats of tung oil. This is what it looked like after the first coat, taken from the same place as the picture above:

In another part of the house the subfloor had been taken out and replaced with plywood so we had to put a new floor over it. We installed some wood we had salvaged from another house that was being gutted. The contractor let us go in and remove the flooring. He was happy to get free labor and less dumpster fees since his plan was to rip it out and throw it away.

Here is one of interns (from an inner city youth organization) helping organize and stack the wood:

.

An interior design student intern who flew out from California during spring break is helping clean the wood:

Stacked and cleaned:

Here we are installing it:

We then sanded it and applied tung oil. Here it is after the first coat:

As one of my employees who migrated from high end renovations in Manhattan to work for Eco Brooklyn said, “These floors look like expensive Manhattan floors.” Even without the great help from interns we turned garbage into beauty at a fraction of the cost of those Manhattan floors. Our client is a first time owner getting a government loan who has a very humble salary.

With intelligent sourcing and salvage we can almost eliminate material costs, allowing me to employ more workers while offering affordable high quality floors to the client. Meanwhile we turn the process into an educational opportunity for aspiring green builders. It is so good to be true it almost seems like magic. How garbage can be turned into beauty while everyone benefits is really amazing to me. And extremely fulfilling. It is what Eco Brooklyn is about.

A couple weeks ago there was a dumpster [...]]]>

There is a gut renovation going on accross the street from our green show house. It is a classic renovation where a lot of money is being spent and not much thought going into how it is done. The owner is getting reamed with prices IMO.

A couple weeks ago there was a dumpster full of old bricks in front of their job site. We took a bunch of the bricks but didn’t need more and didn’t have a place to store them at that time.

So the dumpster went on it’s merry way to the landfill. Dumpster price to contractor: $700 aprox. He was a sub contractor hired to tear down some walls. Old bricks go for a premium over new bricks. They are actually MORE valuable. Value of bricks he threw out: $1200 aprox.

I didn’t loose any tears over it because this kind of waste happens all the time.

But then yesterday I saw they were hauling in NEW bricks! Lots of them. So this time I was annoyed. I went over and asked why they had bought new bricks when they had just thrown away perfectly good old bricks.

“What old bricks!?” The guy asked. He was a sub contractor hired to build the chimneys and knew nothing about the other bricks. He was annoyed to hear they were thrown out because it could have saved him a lot of money.

This is classic construction status quo. One person is doing one thing and not communicating with another part of the job.

One sub-contractor went in and tore down a wall or two and threw out the debris. He left.
Another contractor went in and built a chimney somewhere else with new bricks.
The General Contractor didn’t think.
Had the two been put in communication they could have shared resources, saved money, saved garbage from the landfill, etc.

We took the joists and cut them into long strips.

Then we sealed them on both sides so they don’t warp.

Then we put them onto strips that we had attached to the wall. This [...]]]>

We wanted some siding for a wall we built. So we used some 100 year old joists.

We took the joists and cut them into long strips.

Then we sealed them on both sides so they don’t warp.

Then we put them onto strips that we had attached to the wall. This way there is air behind the siding that keeps them dry.

And VOILA! We have a beautiful wall of siding. The wood lived a productive life for over a hundred years holding up a floor in some Brownstone. Now it can live another 20 protecting this Brownstone.

Here is one job site where they knocked down the whole building.

There were thousands of perfect bricks. The [...]]]>

One thing brownstones have in abundance are bricks. And I keep seeing dumpsters full of them. It is heartbreaking for me. These are beautiful bricks, a hundred years old, with character and texture.

Here is one job site where they knocked down the whole building.

There were thousands of perfect bricks. The next day they were brimming in a dumpster. And the next day when I came with a truck to get some they were gone, off to a landfill.

We got some of their left overs.

We use them everywhere. It is quicker to use cinder blocks, but bricks are my preference. It may be weird but there is something very comforting for me to put these bricks back into the house so they can sleep maybe another 100 years. To send them to the landfill seems so absolutely wrong.

So we happily installed the flooring.

This pic shows the layers. First [...]]]>

We found about 500sq.ft. of 5 inch wide maple plank flooring in a dumpster. It had a very slight warp to it due to it not being installed correctly. But with a little sanding we could get rid of that.

So we happily installed the flooring.

This pic shows the layers. First Pex tubes in sand/structolite mix with stringers 16" on center. Then some paper. Then the wood nailed into the stringers.

Despite our good intentions there were complications….
1. Maple is not a good choice for radiant floor heating since maple bows, warps, expands and contracts more than other woods when there are humidity swings.

2. Wide plank flooring is not good when there are humidity swings because it expands and contracts more than narrow planks.

We had wide planks. We had maple. We had radiant floor heating.

Then we had just laid the sand/structolite mix around the tubes. And my ex-carpenter didn’t give the mix enough time to dry before putting the wood down.

And my ex-carpenter nailed the planks in as if they were narrow plank oak over a normal floor, that is to say he nailed the floor down WAY too tightly. Wide plank, maple, radiant, these are all reasons to lay the wood down with some space between them so they can move.

And sure enough the wood warped immediately. I fired my carpenter.

With my new carpenter we have taken the wood up….yes these free planks of wood, valued at around $3500 for that many square feet, are no longer free. But no worries. We are still way ahead of the game.

The new plan is.

1. dry the wood out.

2. Let the floor dry out.

3. Seal the wood on all sides so that it doesn’t absorb water as well.

4. Before laying the wood we will put a real vapor barrier on the floor.

5. Then if all goes well we will just have to sand out the original bow and have a great, salvaged, affordable floor!