Local Contractor Razing Shorewood Home the Green Way

Erik Lindberg has replaced the bulldozer with the sledgehammer.

They are both effective, get the job done, but the sledgehammer is more socially and environmentally conscious and responsible, he says.

Lindberg owns a Milwaukee-based residential remodeling company called Community Building & Restoration. The contractor typically specializes in older homes — pre-WWII homes in the North Shore, east side of Milwaukee and Wauwatosa among other suburbs in the Milwaukee metro area.

But Lindberg and his team are stepping outside of their comfort zone with a new deconstruction project in Shorewood.

Lindberg and his team will manually deconstruct a Shorewood home near the intersection of East Kensington Boulevard and North Newhall Avenue, piece-by-piece, by hand.

“This is branching out a little bit for us; but our overall concern is becoming environmentally friendly, lessening our environmental impact as much as we can,” Lindberg said.

Slinging their sledgehammers and slowly stripping the property of its valuable materials, Lindberg's team will eventually raze the home to its foundation but save materials and items such as fixtures, cabinets, lights, windows, appliances and lumber and metals. All the possible reusable or recyclable materials gathered will go to local non-profits.

Project manager Alex Montezon said most of the salvaged material will go to Habitat for Humanity.

“Sweet Water Organics will be taking some lumber to build raised-bed gardens,” Montezon added.

Saving almost 4,000 feet of wood

Montezon gave a couple of examples of the salvaged items in this particular house. The oak flooring, over 500 square feet, will be saved as well as all of the framing lumber, which the team estimates at about 3,200 feet. That equates to 400 studs for a future building, he said.

Other materials are recycled.

“It’s always greener to restore a building ... sometimes a building does have to be torn down because it is no longer viable, but to come in with a diesel-powered bulldozer and demolish it and create waste and ship it all off to a landfill leaves a big ecological footprint,” Lindberg said. “What we are doing here is to attempt to really minimize that as much as we can by taking apart the house slowly enough that we can save anything that can be saved.”

Lindberg said the hardest part of the project is getting the permits from different municipalities, as some communities don’t understand the nature of deconstruction.

Lindberg acknowledged deconstruction might run homeowners a little more when it comes to cost, but in some cases, there are actually economic benefits, in addition to the green perks.

With tax credits available, those in the higher tax brackets, theoretically, could either break even or benefit financially, with electing to go with deconstruction over simply demolishing a building. However, it gets tricky with those in a lower tax bracket.

"The home owner pays a little bit more up front for the deconstruction but then they get money back from both the tax benefits or from selling salvaged materials," Lindberg said.

Manual labor provides work opportunity

Additionally, Montezon said the company was also able to hire a crew, as there is no shortage of labor on the site. Instead of bringing in machines to do the job, they were able to give someone a job in a tough market.

“We are giving rid of the automation and machinery and bringing it back to human labor, because it saves energy and provides jobs that truly needed,” Lindberg said.

Juli and Mike Kaufmann, the new owners of the home, plan to build a new green home in place of the old one. She said there were several environmental motivations behind choosing to go with deconstruct.

"Construction waste is one of the most significant contributors to landfills," she said. "It’s my intention to keep things of value out of landfills."

"There are thousands of dollars of valuable materials coming from the home to and going local non-profits."

Lindberg recommends deconstruction as an option for small projects like remodeling a kitchen or bathroom.

"I think the main reason people don't do it (deconstruction) more is they aren't aware of it," Montezon said.

Lindberg said he hopes to make deconstruction a wing of the services his company provides.

"The idea is to be environmentally friendly and lessen our environmental impact," he said. “The idea of salvaging the materials from a house is very, very attractive to us as a company.