Building With Junk and Other Good Stuff: A Guide to Home Building and Remodeling Using Recycled Materials

By Jim Broadstreet; Loompanics Unlimited, Box 1197, Port Townsend, WA 98368. 162 pages, hardcover, $19.95.

Building With Junk is an excellent guide for owner/builders who are trying to build an affordable and interesting home for themselves using recycled or used materials. It provides ideas for sources of scrounged materials, methods of using thrown-out materials without violating building codes, and support for people who are interested in experimenting with non-standard building techniques.

But most readers of this newsletter are professionals in the building business. The architect or designer/builder is probably not going to scrounge materials for individual houses or design a building around a “found object” like a spiral staircase or a beautiful old window. Nevertheless, this book gives us an excellent nudge toward thinking in more creative and less rigid terms about the design and construction of houses. For instance, the author shows several floors and walls made with stone or slate that was being thrown out because it was “broken” or “irregular.” He also suggests checking out demolition sites and reclamation companies for lighting and plumbing fixtures, which can provide a really interesting touch to the final product (though you should avoid using old fixtures or appliances that are wasteful of water or energy). Finally, some building materials may be available used or as “seconds” in the quantities needed to make it cost-effective for builders to purchase them, such as carpet remnants or slightly damaged sheathing panels.

The author takes the risk in a book like this of going too far—of jumping off the deep end and making suggestions that are simply too goofy for today’s world. We don’t believe that this is the case with

Building With Junk for two reasons. First, we all need to be pushed into thinking about resource conservation and creative design to make our buildings more interesting and efficient to build and maintain. And secondly, the author has been careful to stress safety and code compliance while showing innovative ways in which the same results can be achieved using materials that otherwise might have been thrown away.