Our Version of Reduce, Reuse, and Recyle

When we bought our dream home, it was an early 60s ranch. It was also an abandoned foreclosure with broken windows, mold, water damage, and critters of every description already in residence. On our first trip through the house, we laughed and said, “We aren’t tackling all this. Not us.”

Two weeks later, we found ourselves back inside with Darryl Cowan, a contractor friend, whose specialty just happened to be rehabbing old homes. It was a dream home in our eyes from then on and, unlike our family members and friends, we never envisioned it again in less than its finished state. Our architect Randy McClain, another old friend, paid close attention to our anticipated needs for the coming years and assured that our new digs would accommodate our huge family antiques with grace and comfort.

We decided to use the latest technologies that we possibly could in hopes of creating a home that lived more efficiently for the environment and more cost effectively for us. Our efforts even included landscaping with plants native to our area, reducing the need for maintenance and water. This house costs a fraction of what our last house cost to operate, despite its 4200 square feet. And, thanks to the latest energy efficient appliances, we are using far less in power and water.

Our decision to replace carpeting with hardwood floors triggered a storm of exploration into bamboo, red oak, and other woods new to us. Then a friend sent us to see re-milled heart pine that had been reclaimed from the hundred year old mill where her father worked. It was gorgeous, with rich red tones and a perfectly finished surface. We could purchase it in huge rough beams and have it re-milled to suit our needs for flooring. But, the cost of refinishing it and then transporting it to our site made it impossible to consider.

We visited a salvage yard that Darryl purchased materials from on several occasions and, there, in open sheds, were hundreds of feet of reclaimed heart pine. The dealer Joe Stevens told us that he was preparing to remove flooring from an old house about to be demolished. He invited us to take a look at it and, when we arrived, George and I were stunned to find that the house was across the street from a school where we both recently worked. The floors were blackened with grime and stained with every nasty thing imaginable. Because it was already cut in planks, we would be able to move it by pickup truck and sand the old surface off after the floor was laid. Somehow, it felt right.

We also became interested in the thousands of salvaged doors at the yard. After sorting through them all over and over again, we selected five-panel doors that reminded me of visits to my great aunt’s home in my childhood. I was determined to have solid doors, none of that hollow core stuff. The trouble was that the new doors I wanted were about $300 each. We chose salvaged five-panel doors for all our closets and more unique antique doors for our bedrooms and baths. We paid an average of $10 per door, excluding three that were solid mahogany and oak. An old banister from a church called out to us, as well as three louvered shutters from the exterior of an old Victorian mansion that had been taken down years before.

Every floor refinisher who came to look at the heart pine after it had been laid shook his head and said, “I’ll never be able to clean it up or level it to your satisfaction.” Three of them came, worked a day, and never showed up again to work or to be paid. With each of about five sandings, the red depths of the wood were revealed more and more fully. George and I weren’t the least bit bothered by the remaining worm holes, the chips, the varying widths and thicknesses, and the history that showed in an hundred ways.

The banister took three days to strip of the dirt built up over decades. The shutters couldn’t be fully stripped of their lead paint, so we sealed them with glaze to keep the chips from falling in our mouths as we slept, and hung them as a headboard for our new king-size bed. We decided to leave the bedroom and bathroom doors almost exactly as we found them - some completely unstained and some in their original finishes. If we could identify the origin of the door, we labeled it to reflect its past. Our powder room door once hung on the Monsignor’s office of the oldest Catholic Church in town. It now proudly bears the word “Monsignor” in gold and our bathroom door says “Faculty Lounge” on its upper half of frosted glass. Every single door inside the house had to be hand-framed, raising our cost of $10 per door steeply. No two doors in the house are the same size.

In pulling off the original small back porch to replace it with a screened porch running the entire back length of the house, Darryl discovered redwood decking buring under ancient outdoor carpeting and a layer of well-worn plywood. He pulled the redwood off for George, who used it to build all the furniture we now use on the porch.

In the end, we felt the house had been restored to its real age, timeless, of an unidentifiable point in history. Every craftsman who has walked in the door since exclaims, “You kept the original floors and doors!” In fact, we can count the original features of the house on one hand.

Darryl still isn’t quite satisfied. He says that one day he will bring a master finisher back in to sand three additional times and re-poly all the heart pine. And the floor would probably be as pristine as the exquisite one we saw made from re-milled, reclaimed heart pine from the cotton mill. But, it will never happen as long as we own the house. We can tell that children played on these floors, dogs chased cats, fires got out of control, family members were born and died, and life continued through generations. It’s very comforting to see ourselves in that cycle, even if we are a new family in its history. Our family furnishings are at home, as well, and look as if they have been in place since they were handcrafted up to 250 years ago.

Three miles from our house, Southern Living magazine recently completed a million-dollar green home on the campus of Furman University. It’s beautiful and inspiring; if you get a chance to see it, it is well worth the cost of admission. There are a few things I wish we had included in our home, but our house could still be retrofitted to add many of them as we can afford.

But, somehow, the Southern Living home doesn’t feel as good to me as knowing that we brought a great house back to life and that we returned so many idle materials to daily use in both form and function. We built a home, not a house, and the quality of our lives has improved immeasurably as a result. If you have the opportunity, you should see it, too, and it won’t cost you a dime. We’ll be waiting on the porch with iced tea.