ReStore lives up to name in home deconstruction

This article appeared in The Daily hampshire Gazette on Friday, July 4, 2008.
By NICK GRABBE, Staff Writer

AMHERST - When Jess Andrews decided to tear down a water-damaged sunroom attached to her new home, she didn't want the old lumber to land in a landfill.

So she called the ReStore, a nonprofit home improvement center in Springfield that resells used building materials at a third of their retail price. The store bid $1,970 for Jess Andrews' job, and a crew of four deconstructed her 200-square-foot sunroom on Thursday.

The lumber, six windows, and two solar hot water panels went to the store at 250 Albany St., where some do-it-yourselfer or Habitat for Humanity project will buy them and lower their construction costs. To Andrews, who moved here from California to be closer to her two sons, it seemed like a sensible option.

"It's a greener way to live," she said. "We can't keep filling up our dumps with things that can be used."

She'll get a tax deduction for donating the salvaged materials to the ReStore.

The six windows will be easy to sell for about $800, said store manager John Grossman. "And the studs can go right into a building project," he said. The solar panels, which use old technology, will fetch $100 to $200 each, he said.

The ReStore, which started in 2001, has helped 20,000 residents improve their homes with low-cost materials, saving more than $1 million over a five-year period. It has over 350 commercial donors and well as residents like Andrews.

The ReStore was featured recently on the TV show "This Old House" as it deconstructed a home in Weston. It's a self-sustaining nonprofit that gets no grants and puts any surplus it generates back into the business, said Grossman.

He is the great-grandson of Lewis Grossman, who founded the lumber company that bears his name after starting with a junk wagon in Quincy. "I'd like to think my great-grandfather would be proud, as a lumberman and salvager," he said.

The ReStore has a "triple bottom line," Grossman said, considering the environmental and social impact of its work as well as the economics. If Andrews' deconstruction project had not involved the salvage of materials, the ReStore would not have bid on it, he said.

There's a lot of pressure on landfills in Massachusetts, Grossman said.

"This kind of demolition waste can't go in the ground, but has to be crunched up and put on a train for Ohio," he said. "It's impractical. From a community perspective, when people realize these materials can help people fix up their homes at low cost, they're eager to do it."

A lot of energy went into manufacturing, transporting and installing the materials that were used to build Jess Andrews' sunroom, Grossman said.

"It's lost to the ether if it's crunched up," he said. "When it's reused, you recapture that energy and it's like the wood was locally harvested."

The ReStore is a program of the Center for Ecological Technology, which has an office in Northampton.