I just go a call from Joel Frank, one of the three members of the Rebuilder Source cooperative in the Bronx. They accept donations of building materials and resell them at good prices. The drive behind them is mostly idealistic: one of making the world a greener place by reusing materials. He was just reaching […]
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Eco Brooklyn has one rule: we don’t buy new wood. We buy damaged wood, salvaged wood, unwanted wood, and overstock from other Brooklyn contractors. We collect it from dumpsters. But we won’t buy new wood. Period. It is the thorn in my carpenters’ side. When they are under pressure to perform (which is always), time
We’ve been using PolyWhey Natural Wood Finish from Vermont Natural Coatings for a lot of our salvaged floors and we are very happy with their product. First of all you can apply it in a closed room without barely any smell. It is really low VOC and the VOC that is present is not noxious
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Here you see the Eco Brooklyn team diligently salvaging some beat up old stairs in a Brooklyn Brownstone. Along the Eco Brooklyn credo we salvage anything we can. Buying new is our last resort. But we keep in mind the cost. If it costs the same in materials and labor to salvage than buy new
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At Eco Brooklyn we are always looking for ways to reduce, reuse or recycle. Here is a cool thing we just discovered today. Because we refinish a lot of old wood floors, either subfloors or salvaged floors that others deemed too beaten up to keep, we do a lot of sanding. We go through A
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Since we are in the salvage and reuse business for all our building we are always on the look out to get good salvaged stuff in the New York area. Here is a great place: the Habitat ReStores. It’s not exactly in the NY area but it is close. We’ve not had the opportunity to
Our green building company in Brooklyn, NY, has a kindred soul in Huntsville, Texas. It is called Phoenix Commotion and is run by Dan Phillips. I’ve read about him a couple times, most recently in the NY Times. He builds for lower income people and his buildings are almost totally out of trash. Yet they
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Somebody just paid us to cover up a tin ceiling! If it weren’t for the fact that we did a green roof and all sorts of other green stuff for them we would have refused. And then there are others who throw it out. And yet others who pay huge prices to get it installed
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Electric conduit is hard to salvage because the scrap people get to it before it goes into the dumpster. They take it to the scrap yard for pennies on the pound. If we can get to them before they get to the yard we are happy to give them much more than what they get
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The greenest flooring option is to keep the one you have. If it is wood, then simply sand it and seal it with tung oil. It will look better than new. If it is tiles, then re-grout it and replace the cracked tiles. The exception is if it is laminate or linoleum – then get
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