Saving costs and retaining quality through Creative Deconstruction

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - At a time of rising lumber costs and diminishing quality, a little Cortes Island business has been demonstrating how the materials from existing houses can be reused in a variety of ways. 


“We call our business Creative Deconstruction. We take apart buildings by hand and sell the building materials that are still in good condition to people who are building. We also try to process whatever can't be reused in ways that are also healthy,” explained Max Thaysen.


On their website there are photos of beams and other lumber, particle board, sheet roofing, a metal railing, and hardware, as well as building a garage, chairs and a table. 


“We make a little bit of firewood from wood that is clean and can't be reused in various ways.  A little bit of stuff still ends up going to the landfill.” 


“Me and Travis Pollack run this business together and we've been operating for five or six years. We've probably taken apart 10 house sized buildings over that time, and some smaller stuff.” 


“We have a little storage yard here and something like three quarters of the stuff that we get doesn't even come back here. It goes straight to somebody's building site, which is really convenient because it reduces the shipping and handling and so reduces costs for us and costs for the customer.”


“It's mostly been going to our friends building houses for themselves. This is also how I've built my house and I think that we've contributed to the construction of probably 10 houses around Cortes.” 


“Its always been a really special part of our business that we’ve provided really great  Really great quality materials to people who are building houses, and they saved a bunch of money by shopping with us. And so we contributed to affordable housing on Cortes Island as one of the sort of goals of our work. it's super gratifying to have a quadruple bottom line.”


“We have a small inventory remaining. And we found that it's a profitable business. We save people money on building materials while paying ourselves a decent wage.”