Friday, July 8, 2011

Bring in Habitat for Humanity before you do the demolition of your home

Allow habitat for humanity at your house before you tear it down.
If you decide to Demolish a home so that you can build another one you should really give habitat for humanity a call. It only takes a phone call to set up a time for them to come out and look at your existing home.
Some townships have it written in there building bylaws that you have to give habitat for humanity an opportunity to salvage anything usable from your house before you tear it down.
If you don’t know what habitat for humanity does, it is a non profit organization that builds houses for people that cannot afford to buy a house for themselves. It’s a truly wonderful organization and can help a lot of people in your community.
Habitat for humanity takes the things that they salvage from people’s homes and sells them in their store. They take the money from the sales of these items and put it toward the cost of building homes for people who need them. The homes are built with donations of materials, sometimes the donation of land and a lot of volunteer help. I have personally helped in some of these builds and have found it a very rewarding experience.
It’s not just a good deed that you are doing, a lot times habitat will take the windows, the kitchens, some furniture, flooring, wood ceilings, siding and everything else they think they can sell. One of the largest costs associated with demolishing a house is the removal to the dump. Trucking is expensive with the rising cost of fuel and at the dump you pay per pound. So the more material that is removed from your house before it is demolished then the less trucking you have and the less weight you’ll have to pay.
The other factor is that you lessen the impact on your local dump; houses take a lot of room up in a dump and space is becoming harder to find for dumps these days.
I have removed personal items like trim boards from doors for people who marked the height of their children as they were growing up. We then re-installed them in the new house once it was built so that they could always remember those times even through that building that it happened in is gone.
Sometimes gas fireplaces can be reused as well in a new home, as long as they are able to meet current safety standards.
So if you’re worried about all the waste that will come out of tearing down an old house to build a new one, think about picking up the phone and calling Habitat for Humanity. It will be good for your wallet and also good for your karma.
Rob Abbott
Operations Manager
Village Builders Inc. 

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