Sustainable Me: The tale of 15 Haywood St: How to demolish a house sustainably

This post has been written by my Mum, Suzy Toovey. She expertly tells the tale of trying to demolish our family house in a sustainable manner. It's a story full of high and lows, but it's also one of perseverance. Read on and enjoy. Thanks Mum!
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I was driving to an appointment this afternoon and I was thinking what can inspire me to write a piece for Libby’s blog when I saw this tram go past and thought “how is that for inspiration”. Just like the tram advertising loudly Sirena Tuna’s “Sustainably Caught 100% Pole & Line One Fish At A Time”, we need to be committed to and be loud and bold about sustainability.

The Toovey family have over the last several months embarked on a huge project. This project has involved planning and organising to build 2 townhouses on the land that our home has sat on for over 50 years with it being our family home for over 30 years of those years.

Our house

However, when it came to choosing a demolisher I was determined to find one who was eco-friendly and had environmentally sustainable practices. The first demolisher recommended by the architects really didn’t fit the bill, and being the client from “hell”, I was determined to find a demolisher who cared about the environment, had sustainable practices and wouldn't just put all of our house into landfill.

Before choosing a demolisher I put out feelers to see if we could sell the house i.e the physical building of 5 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, kitchen, family room etc. Initially house movers responded saying it was too big and too hard to move and no one would want it, but I wouldn’t give no for answer.

Thanks to my love of Google surfing I found “Eco demolition”, a demolition company that tries to reduce landfill by recycling bricks, roof tiles, pavers and timber and turns them into “eco bricks” which are like briquettes and can be used to fuel wood burning fire places. I felt that by at least using this demolisher we were attempting to be sustainable.

But the story does not end there. I still believed that I would be able to find someone that wanted to relocate our whole house to another sire. You don’t get much money from this but it does salvage the house and it lives again. This journey led me to “Moving Views”, a family owned house removal company who were willing to try and give our home a second chance by advertising it as “The Colonial”. We had two parties interested in our humble abode and one lady even came all the way from past Bendigo. She liked it enough to come and look at it with all her grandchildren including her grandson Elvis whose birthday they were celebrating that day.

However, it was my mistake not to list the house earlier and I would recommend anyone trying to have their house removed from their site to give at least 4 months to do this to hopefully result in a positive outcome. Unfortunately for us this journey did not have a positive outcome.

As the demolition date neared I continued to hassle the demolisher about saving our windows as they were beautiful cedar windows but this was another dead end. A lady from a company which on sells things from homes came and visited and said anything over 10 years old can’t be salvaged as people are not interested in it. This meant most of our house was ‘un-salvageable’ even though nearly everything was in good condition.

Before

In an attempt to salvage things for our own use, we took the cedar roof and the round porthole in our living room and the Oregon beams that hold it up. Nick’s friend from Somers (also called Nick) work tirelessly to do this for us. Something others had said could not be done.We plan to use all of these things in the new house, somehow (suggestions welcomed).

After: the cedar roof and porthole are gone

Finally in desperation when the demolisher said that they were just going to knock over the house without salvaging anything from it, I searched for someone who might want our windows and take any timber from the house. There was no one in metropolitan Melbourne who was at all interested and I only found someone in Bendigo by chance. Bendigo is the place to be it seems.

When I spoke to Christian from “Renovate, Restore, Recycle” he was extremely positive and I felt like my prayers had been answered. Christian and his team came down the following week and took out all but 2 of our windows and about half our floor boards.

Before

After, with the windows gone!

I did feel some elation that someone, somewhere would make use of the windows and the timber he salvaged. These items to Christian had real value and he had created a business around sustainability. This was certainly not the case for the other avenues I had tried.

They even took all the floor!

My final comment about being sustainable when you are demolishing a house is plan early. If you plan to try and sell things on Gumtree give yourself at least 2-3 months. If you want to see if your house can be relocated by someone who wants it give yourself 4-6 months. Also be prepared to come across the attitude that it is too hard to salvage and costs too much. The one thing that helped me keep going was that I am stubborn and believed somewhere, someone could make use of items from our house before it was demolished. I felt like the house was the equivalent of an organ donor and it was a good feeling to know someone may use the items salvaged.