recycling with rik
When is a prison not a prison? Come on, think outside the box. It’s simple really.
Give up? Answer: When it’s an RV barn. When it’s the roof of a porch or a pole building. When it’s skirting around a modular home. When it’s a storage shed.
Here’s how the transformation works:
In the spring of 2003, MoMike Demolition of Spokane began the piece-by-piece deconstruction of a detention overflow facility in Tacoma. The majority of the 150,000 square-foot facility, from cell doors to stainless steel toilets, was loaded onto trucks and hauled to Yakima. There it would be reassembled and once again used as a detention facility.
But 1,500 sheets of perfectly good ¾-inch plywood were not to be reused. MoMike offered this plywood for sale at its Spokane Valley salvage yard. Victor Dituri bought some of that plywood.
Dituri, who lives near Ford, Wash., says he likes “farmy” ways of doing things – being frugal and not wasting, but instead improvising.
“I was raised that way,” he says, “never throw stuff away. Keep it until you can find a use for it or give it to someone who has a use.”
Years back, Dituri grew hay, but hadn’t for some time, and wind and weather took their toll on his hayshed. So when neighbors asked if they could tear apart the hayshed for some of its lumber, Dituri said yes.
What his neighbors didn’t use, Dituri did. He combined the hayshed lumber with the MoMike plywood and built an addition to his RV barn. The hayshed’s joist hangers were reused, as were its old spikes, after Dituri had straightened them.
Dituri says friends and family got in on the plywood bonanza, too. A neighbor used some of the plywood for skirting around his modular home and some for a porch roof. Dituri’s brother-in-law used 30 sheets to make portable storage sheds.
That’s how prison plywood found a “new life” on the outside. This pleases MoMike co-owner Mo Noder.
“I think it’s a crime to use the landfills as much as we do,” Noder says. “Lots of times people just crush a building and haul it to the dump. But people could reuse that material.”
MoMike’s inventory of reclaimed materials includes fairly typical salvage items: angle iron, pipe and tubing, 18- by 18-inch marble squares, sinks, tubs, counter tops, skylight windows, fire extinguisher cabinets, iron-drainage grates, decorative banister posts, school gym lockers, stained-glass panels, lumber and masonry products.
Noder says, however, that MoMike is also a “purveyor of architectural antiques.”
“We’ve got things unique to the Northwest,” he says. “A dozen or more 1905 toilets from Lewis & Clark High School – they have beautiful lattice detailing just under the rim. Hand-cut granite, vintage doorknobs and fixtures from the area’s old buildings. There’s lot of character in that stuff.”
Not only are items like this unique, they also cut down the cost of building and restoration projects.
“Choosing to use these reclaimed building materials instead of buying new, you can save money,” Noder says. “At the salvage yard, everything is priced about 50 percent off new, depending on the quality.”
Victor Dituri, confirms the savings.
“When Tacoma bought the prison plywood, it was top quality. At today’s prices it probably would cost almost $40 a sheet. I got it for $10 a sheet,” he says.
“You don’t have to buy brand new,” Dituri adds. “Anymore it’s hard to find decent lumber. They’re cutting smaller trees and you don’t get core-cut. A lot of the time the old, salvaged stuff is much better.”
If you recycle you don’t have to haul.
“It’s just practical all the way around to recycle rather than take the stuff to the dump,” says Dituri’s son, Ben, of Spokane. Ben used 20 sheets of the MoMike plywood for the roof deck of his own pole building.
“It’s like trash-to-treasure,” the younger Dituri says.
And that, Grasshopper, sounds like some family values have been passed down father to son.
For more information about the inventory and availability of stock at MoMike Demolition, visit their website www.MoMike.com, call them at 535-1718, or stop by their salvage yard at 1318 N. Fancher Way.