Recycled & waste materials

When milling the features of my house, I used reclaimed materials whenever possible.

The doors are milled from 220 year old lumber: hard pine floor joists which came out of a 1790's cape which was disassembled and moved. The timber was harvested on the present site of Timberlee Park, my childhood home (a 1970's neighborhood development), and was milled at the Cooperage, a local sawmill.

The window sashes are milled out of wall studs which came from my brother's 1948 home. The studs were beautiful, clear, straight-grained douglas fir with 20 growth rings per inch. These framing studs, which today would be grown from fast-growing spruce, were harvested in a time when old-growth forests were more abundant. One would be hard-pressed to find wood this nice in a lumberyard today, even at a steep price.

The jambs of the windows are made from reclaimed waste wood: timber cut-offs from a timber-frame jobsite.

The walls are built from scraps of SIPs (structural insulated panels) which I salvaged from a SIP manufacturer's yard. The scraps were bound for the dumpster, and by building my house out of them, I was giving them a second chance at life.