Wasting no wreckage

By Cliff Newell

The Lake Oswego Review, May 15, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Submitted Photo / Lake Oswego Review

As opposed to having the wreckage from her home end up in a landfill, Kate Warton decided to work with the Deconstruction Service to tear down their home and salvage the materials. She and her husband John paid $8,000 for more than three fourths of the home materials to be saved and resold to families at the Rebuilding Center of Our United Villages.

The idea of having the wreckage of their old home end up in a landfill was quite unappealing to Kate Warton of Lake Oswego.

So she and her husband John decided to do the sustainable thing. They hired the Deconstruction Service to handle the job of tearing down the home, then saving as much of it as possible.

“They took care of everything, asbestos testing, permits,” Warton said. “They were wonderful.

“With our house they took it down bit by bit and recycled and reused everything. With our house it went all the way down to the cement slab.”

The bottom line was that 85 percent of the house was able to be saved for further use.

Shane Endicott, executive director of the Deconstruction Service, was happy to do the right — and smart — thing.

“An awareness has been raised about this,” Endicott said. “It makes a lot of sense to choose deconstruction over demolition.

“So often people have told me, ‘I wish I had known about this before I did my project.’ Then there are people like Kate.”

Warton proved to be a perfect candidate to go the route of deconstruction.

“As a landscape designer, my impetus is to be sensitive to our environment,” she said. “I’m in a green industry and I’m been on the edge of this trend since moving to Oregon. Also, I grew up in the home of the original recyclers, good Midwest farm folks.”

This being the case, Kate and her husband John wanted to do something different when they bought a piece of property on Sixth Street. They desired to tear down the old house and build a new one.

“We wanted to build a cottage on it,” Warton said. “We love Lake Oswego and we love the First Addition. I wanted to have a little more space than I had and I wanted to have a garden.”

With a little research, Warton found that Deconstruction Service was the best in its line of work.

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