I have a pet peeve with home renovation shows. It doesn't matter what show it is but... on Demo Day... they all tend to go in and just smash up perfectly good kitchen cabinets and stone counters. Why??? It seems like such a waste. A waste of money, a waste of materials, a waste of... well... waste. All that stuff has to go somewhere, into some landfill somewhere. I know it looks good on TV but... seriously?
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| Fixer Upper - Chip & Joanna Gains |
There are some shows where they will actually take out the cabinets carefully and say that they are sending them off to be repurposed. But those shows are in the definite minority. Maybe it costs too much to lift out stone counter tops? Easier and cheaper to just smash everything with a sledge hammer?
We did a kitchen reno last year and there was no smashing involved. A couple of friends came over and helped us take the 40 year old cabinets off the walls. It wasn't a lot of fun because some of the cabinet screws had been painted several times but... we got them all down with no smashing. And our friends then loaded up all the cabinets and used them in their garage. These weren't even wood cabinets, just cheap builder-grade laminate/particle board cabinets. But they got a second life.
Our old laminate counter top, on the other hand, did go to the dump. If it had been a long 6 foot stretch, we would have taken it to the ReStore where someone could have used it for something. But... our longest stretch was 8 feet with a big hole in the middle for the double sink sooo... off to the dump it went.
Which just goes to show that it can be done. I've seen people list old kitchens on Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace and sell them. Or just give them away for free. Look in a few open garages in your neighbourhood and you might see a whole plethora of storage cabinets thanks to a kitchen reno.
As for stone counter tops... there are a gazillion YouTube videos about how to take them out in one piece. But then what? Donate it. Sell it. Use it in the garden. Get it cut into tiles. Use it for a fireplace. Use it for mosaic flooring. The possibilities are endless. And the dump should be the last place for stone counters...
Which makes me wonder... all of those home reno shows just tend to toss all the waste into a big dumpster. Does all of that just go into the landfill? Or does someone, somewhere, sort through all of that stuff and pick out the wood and the tile and the insulation and the drywall? At first I thought, Noooo, that can't be but... apparently with environmental laws, there are some things that can't be dumped in the landfill all willy nilly... things like wood and drywall and metal.
I found the local DBL site and... will you look at that... There's a pic of workers sorting through a dumpster load of construction waste. Looks like a pile of drywall in the background. Go figure... so they DO recycle all that stuff. At least... here they do.
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| DBL workers sorting through construction waste (from DBL site) |
But... the Gold Star for limiting the amount of waste goes to another company called... Unbuilders. Because, it's not just kitchen renos that create waste. There are also whole houses that get demolished. And those often go something like this...
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| House Demo via Wikipedia |
Yup, just get a digger machine and start tearing away at it... then load it all into a dumpster and send it off for sorting and disposal. Again... seems like such a waste.
But... Ta-daaaaahhh!!! Unbuilders to the rescue! They are a Vancouver company that unbuilds houses... Check out this 1 minute YouTube video of them unbuilding a house.
Smart, eh? Because some of those houses have old-growth timber in them (used up until the 1970s) and that stuff is pure gold in today's market. While traditional demo companies take the wood to be chipped and burned as fuel... Unbuilders sees a better use, a second life, for ancient lumber.
Yes, unbuilding takes longer and costs more but... there are a few other things to consider. Homeowners who go the way of unbuilding qualify for a tax credit. So even though Unbuilders cost $45,000 for a traditional home ($10,000 more than a regular demolition), the tax credits allow the homeowner to come out ahead with big savings.
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| Stack of salvage lumber from Unbuilders site |
The Unbuilders salvage anything and everything - metal pipes, wiring, wooden floors, sinks, appliances. Their current record for a single home is 96.8 per cent of materials salvaged or recycled and diverted from the landfill. The only things that can't be recycled or salvaged are vinyl flooring and asphalt shingles.
It's nice to know that there are companies out there that don't just crash and smash and toss. And... the Unbuilders have come to Vancouver Island too!! Excellent news...
P.S. Second Pet Peeve
The habit of home renovation shows to call everything "granite". Not all stone is "granite"! There's marble, soapstone, labradorite, granite, basalt, gneiss, granodiorite, gabbro, diorite and... a whole array of stone that is used to make counters. None of which are "granite" although some could be called "granitic".
Granite, geologically speaking, is a very specific rock type with a very specific ratio of minerals like quartz, two types of feldspar, mica and maybe some amphiboles. This is granite... see the pink feldspar... typical of granite.
These... are NOT granite... although they are called "granite" by home design/decor/renovation folks. Sigh. Sloppy language...
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