Did I say something about piles of firewood?

Last week I mentioned I was putting everything I’ve been tearing off of the old studio in four or five different piles. One of those was for firewood – like pinewood framing cutoffs and shorter lengths of the oak siding that used to cover the studio. Or even some of the longer ones: We had a contractor type come over a couple weeks back to offer some guidance on the studio’s deconstruction, and when I mentioned I was hoping to offload a lot of the siding, his basic response was good luck, buddy. He said the pieces and boards probably weren’t long enough or in good enough shape to really demand much attention. “I’d just throw it on the firewood pile.”

Well, after a quick leaf through last week’s New York Times Style design issue, mine eyes have been opened. Piet Hein Eek, a designer in Holland, makes chairs, cabinets and even beds out of scrapwood – discarded bits like cutoffs and odd lengths that he picks up wherever. I’m now deeply fantasizing about moving to Holland and learning at his feet, but also he’s made me reconsider the future of my discarded bits. They don’t need to be long. I can (re)use them as the exterior siding (on the non-plastered part of my straw-bale building), or as cabinetry on the inside, or as part of a desk, or as part of those killer shelf-type things he has on his site. (If you look closely above “Dealers” on Eek's home page, you’ll see what I’m talking about.) So radical.

This is the kind of thing we need to think about as people progress toward a green future, pulling as much use from the unwanted and “unusable” junk that now populates our landfills. William McDonough thinks we need to build our cities like forests: making oxygen, sequestering carbon, reusing for energy what it discards as waste.

Maybe that’s a little highfalutin when discussing furniture makers. Still, Eek's was one of the rarer stories in these kinds of mags that make me hopeful rather than low about the future.

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But enough of the high hat. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last week alone. It finally dawned on me – well, on my smart wife – that rounding up a few peeps to help me tear the place down might be useful.

With six hands working instead of two, we’ve got a fourth wall down and all the cedar shingles off the roof and hauled away.

Yes, I did insist he wear that uniform.

If the rain hadn’t rolled in, we could have been totally roofless. (After about the 50th day of sunshine in a row, we finally got some rain here in Boulder; it’s been pouring for about 24 hours. We even got some snow up top.)


As it is, only some plywood sheathing and the rafters remain. By Wednesday, I want to be roofless. And wall-less, but I’ve already learned my lesson with overly ambitious deadline setting.

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One quick word about those cedar shingles. Our little roof held a lot of them – like, an entire tree’s worth. We can’t reuse them; many of them are falling apart anyway, and Boulder building code won’t allow them on houses past 2014. Originally I was just going to throw them in the woodstove this winter. It turns out Western Disposal, the local trash company, accepts shingles as clean wood waste – along with other construction waste like 2x4s and plywood – that they grind up for mulch and compost. A much better option than burning, especially if you ask this guy.