On a quiet street off South Boulder Road in Boulder, an old house was slowly going to pieces. Of the five bedrooms, three baths, formal dining area, and living room, only a few brick wall corners and two chimneys remained standing. The ghost of a floor plan traced the concrete foundation. In the front yard, a crew of three workers de-nailed beams they’d freed by hand from the walls and now-gone roof. One balanced a two-by-six board on wooden sawhorses and used a pneumatic nail remover to blast nails through the beam. One by one, they pinged onto the driveway. Another crew member measured and trimmed the boards, then piled the lumber onto a trailer.
Built in 1955, the house contained something none of the modern construction nearby could. A two-by-four board fetched from the hardware store today would likely have thick rings, a sign of young trees felled. In comparison, this lumber’s freshly cut ends revealed the tightly stacked, gorgeous rings of an old Douglas fir.
“You can’t buy that new,” says Anna Perks, founder of Perks Deconstruction, whose crew had spent about two weeks taking the house down. “You’re only getting that type of wood if you reclaim.”
For the past four years, Perks has made a living by giving that type of wood a chance at a second life. A new Denver ordinance called Waste No More, which, in part, will require construction and demolition projects to recycle and reuse certain materials, may mean her business is about to boom.
Currently, when a homeowner decides to demolish a house,
