#reuse of materials
The reuse of materials makes sense. The downside? Designers more often than not design before sourcing materials, which makes reuse tougher. It’s not always possible to find the exact steel beam you need for a space already configured. Wood is usually the easiest reuse material to work with, as it can be cleaned up and easily modified to fit the situation. Also, there are a number of existing salvage businesses that source, mill, sell, and deliver larger timbers and engineered lumber (wood I-joists, glu lams and the like).
For other materials, we recently came across Planet Reuse. (PR has reused timber too, but we’ve got local sources for that already.) While we have yet to use them, we are pretty sure it will be a simpler way to integrate reused materials into future commercial projects. Need some steel I-joists from a temporary road bridge, say 36″ deep? How about hundreds of feet of wrought iron fencing that looks like it came from the set of a Tim Burton movie?
While we enjoy climbing around salvage yards as much as the next person, not every client is as smitten with greasy hands and twisted ankles. Planet Reuse might be a simpler way to find the steel web joists we used in this kitchen. These were sourced in a Minneapolis salvage yard, two feet longer than what we needed, which required us to change the design to fit the material. Not such a big deal in a residence, a bigger headache in a larger building.
