Posted on 12/23/2012 10:57:27 PM PST by ExxonPatrolUs
More home buyers who want to tear down an existing home and rebuild on the same lot are doing so without wrecking balls and bulldozers. "Deconstruction" [with tax credits] is a growing trend in the West Coast housing market. WSJ's Monika Vosough reports.
A little more meat on the bone might attract a few more of us buzzards to the thread. FR allows a 300 word excerpt, you know.
It says there is a video so why don’t you go watch it?
Very interesting.
Maybe because I prefer to read an excerpt sufficient to understand the point of the article, then discuss the merits, etc. with other Freepers.
If a posted excerpt piques my interest enough, I'll go read the whole article, or watch the related video. But I'm not going to click through to someone's video or blog, just to find out that I've wasted my time chasing down the meat of the story.
My dad used to have a business doing this, used to be that you could sell everything from a house, the cleaned bricks, the denailed lumber, windows, doors, staircases, toilets, sinks, he used to build new houses with a lot of that material.
Tax credit? My money?
Find a carpenter willing to work with recycled lumber?
Who pull out all of those old nails?
working with a lot of lumber cut too short to deal with?
An old water heater in my new home?
This just doesn’t look feasible to me.
Well : It’s the West Coast.
I don’t like videos. I want to read the story.
When I was in high school my dad was given a house with the condition that we tear it down and clear the lot. He took it to get the lumber. We ended up with a LOT of usable wood among other things. There was no labor cost because it was myself, two sisters and four brothers along with dad who tore it down. Pulling out old nails is one hell of a chore. The scrap lumber that we couldn’t use was given to my high school for it’s annual bonfire.
I don’t ever want to do that again.
A froend gave me some 20 foot 2x6’s he took from the garage he tore down. I didn’t think I would ever get all of those old nails out.
The longer boards are worth the effort, not sure the shorter ones are.
I'm with you-- I helped to tear down an old barn once and my main job was pulling nails, thousands of nails.
Summary: Rich people spend $50,000 to deconstruct. Not so rich pay $10,000 to demolish.
Thanks, EPU. Now I get the gist of it.
You know, when I was in my early years in the trades, I worked for a contractor who did a lot of work restoring and customizing old homes in the Hollywood hills. In order to properly restore some of them, we had to track down original building materials that matched the old stuff.
Even then, there were outfits that specialized in stocking old original components from demolished houses. Most of that stuff cost an arm and a leg compared to their modern equivalents.
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