In the News!

Deconstruction saves, reuses architectural parts

April 7, 2005

BY ALEX SUCZEK
GROSSE POINTE NEWS

Seeing a new house go up on a vacant lot in your neighborhood is a routine experience. It's hardly routine, however, when the new structure rises on a lot where a perfectly good house has been for a long time.

Was the old house of historic value? Is the new house an improvement? How will it affect property values?

Many of those questions and their answers have come up recently for residents of Lewiston between Kercheval and Grosse Pointe Boulevard. They are about to see a 55-year-old house disappear before their eyes and a new one rise in its place.

Fortunately, the answers are uniformly positive and reassuring.

How the owners of the house came to this decision is a story in itself. The family has two young children. The father's professional activity is located in Grosse Pointe, and they bought the home at 88 Lewiston two years ago, with the intention of remodeling it just enough to suit their . lifestyle.

They liked the location. The father's sister lives in the neighborhood. With a little remodeling, the house seemed eminently suitable.

While the house stood empty, discussions with an architect focused on enlarging and updating the original kitchen, finding room to make the garage accommodate three cars and adding a contemporary family room.

Soon, imaginations turned to wishes for a larger master bedroom and bathroom, more closet space and changes to the other bedrooms. They considered revising the floor plan to . add to the comfortable living space and to create a livable basement.

Issues of style and structure arose. How could the architect match the new construction to the original building? How effective and aesthetically pleasing would it be, patched on to the original structure? And how much would all this cost?

They began to explore whether it would make more sense to demolish the old house and build a new one. There was little hope for a different location. Finding an empty lot was not an option, as there are few vacant lots in Grosse Pointe; none that size in that neighborhood.

There is precedent for tearing down old houses, even in Grosse Pointe where we value the grace, quality and tradition of our homes. In recent years an older home at Lothrop and Kercheval and another one in the same area were taken down and replaced. Demolishing the old house and building a new one - it was worth exploring.

The owners of 88 Lewiston set out on a project to estimate costs of taking down the old house and creating the home of their dreams. First they had to seek demolition and building permits from the city. Meanwhile, discussions with the architect took a new turn.

A query to the local historical society brought assurance that the existing house was not historically significant. Nobody objected to taking it down:

A crucial factor in the decision was cost, of course. But there were also considerations of sentiment and the destruction of a perfectly good building.

This led the family to a particularly exciting discovery.

Hoping to avoid just dumping a lot of debris in a landfill, they called Habitat for Humanity to see if it could use some of the materials and fixtures from the demolished house.

Habitat informed them that they could take elements that were easy to remove, but it did not have the capability to salvage structural materials. For structural materials, Habitat refers clients to a nonprofit company that tears down buildings in a process called deconstruction.

Deconstruction preserves most of the materials for reuse. The company is - Architectural Salvage Warehouse of Detroit (ASWD), and it is currently operating as an affiliate of Habitat, which is located at I-96 and Greenfield.

ASWD is a boon to builders and contractors seeking traditional, quality materials for both new construction and restoration. It is also a service that makes it both cost-effective and ecologically beneficial for customers to take down a building.

Conferences with a tax attorney and accountant assured the owners that ASWD offered an economically competitive alternative to wrecking ball demolition. ASWD is a tax-exempt under section 501(c)3 of the tax code, because along with the environmental benefit of recycling valuable building materials, ASWD also trains workers in the building trades. Workers learn how to put building together by taking them apart, piece by piece.

The owner makes a tax-deductible gift of the house to ASWD and pays for the labor of deconstruction. ASWD gains the additional income it needs to operate by selling the salvaged materials.

With tax benefits, the cost to the owner is about the same as it would be for demolition. The big differences are that the highly skilled process of deconstruction takes a little longer, and it makes valuable materials available for beneficial use instead of being dumped.

In the meantime, Lewiston and all of Grosse Pointe can take satisfaction over another feather in its cap. A discriminating family, appreciating the ambience and wholesomeness of the community, is replacing a somewhat outdated home with a beautiful new one so they can have the home of their dreams in Grosse Pointe.

This is a strong statement about the desirability of the location, it says a lot about the quality and the status of the Grosse Pointe area.

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