Waste and it’s generation is where my attention is focused presently. Then what happens to this waste. We are a throw away culture. Things are not produced to last very long. The length of time a manufacturer will stand behind a product is getting shorter, and the support for repairing products is getting more and more expensive. Companies are creating proprietary products that essentially state if you want this you will have to buy it from us, and if you want it repaired you will have to buy the repairs from us. This isn’t new, it has been taking place for a hundred years. As example I own a home that was built in 1886. Recently we decided to replace the wall to wall carpeting in three rooms of the house. What happens to the old carpet each time this is done? It ends up in a landfill as waste. We had gotten quotes to have the work done, and the estimate was ridiculously high and as part of the cost we were paying for someone else’s lifestyle that was certainly higher then our own. And each of these quotes involved just throwing the old materials away, and adding ever increasingly expensive new ones in their place. Replace your windows, they bring in a dumpster and throw the old windows in it. Replace your roof, and they bring in a dumpster and the the old shingles in it. Update a kitchen and they bring in a dumpster and throw the old counters and sinks and cabinets in it.
I decided to do some of the work myself. I am a rather handy guy to have around. So I pulled up the carpeting cutting it into 3 foot strips to be laid in the garden next year as mulch. The carpet pad had deteriorated badly and there was nothing I came of with to repurposed it, and no one was recycling it. And now it is resting three feet down in the landfill. I could find no other option. What we found below the carpet was a maple hardwood floor in rather bad shape, but in not too bad a shape where I thought I could repair it. We had replaced the carpet once before but had hired someone else to do the work so we were unaware of what was below it. We guessed from some of the evidence present, the wall to wall carpet was first installed in the 1950’s to cover up old problems, that was about the time frame wall to wall carpeting had become inexpensive enough to be afforded by the average home owner. The house originally had an oil furnace in it and there were wood burning stoves to supplement the heating on the second floor. The way homes were constructed back then didn’t allow for much duct work in the walls.
When the house was converted to natural gas all of the venting was replaced but it didn’t match the holes in the flooring so they filled in the gaps with scrap wood and carpeted it over. There was a channel found where some one had chiseled a groove to accommodate an old 75 ohm antenna wire for tv reception into the front room of the house. The floor was very squeaky and to repair that the flooring had to be taken up. I had planned to use some of the flooring from one room to replace the damage in another and then find some scraps on the reclaimed market to repair the floor in the second room and that is where I got stuck.
I had to do considerable modification to get the tongue and groove flooring in one room to match the tongue and grooves in the other room. During the repair of the front room I had to pull up a few boards and found newspaper had been placed between the sub-floor and the hardwood to act as a moisture barrier to stabilize moisture transfer between the basement below and the hardwood above. On one of the scraps of newspaper we found a date, Feb. 29, 1929. and on the back of one of the boards pulled up was a stamp from the mill that manufactured the flooring. Holt Lumber, Oconto Wi.
After a little research that company went out of business in the 1950. We also found a stamp on the wood from the other room. CJK Meyer’s Wisconsin Land & Lumber Co. that was originally located in a town just 40 miles away. I found documentation on line that when the native forests in this area had been cleared the owner of that company bought some land in Upper Michigan and in 1898 the mill was moved there and the facility near us was shut down. That company had developed milling machinery that had a tapered tongue and groove. That company shut down in 1913. Holt lumber used different milling machinery. It’s boards were slightly thinner and rather then tapered tongue and grooves used squared milling tongue and groove.
After talking with several experts in the floor restoration field, they felt it was extremely unlikely I would find any reclaimed wood from the Wisconsin Land & Lumber mill, that would mate with the floor from that period in time. So here I sit, the front room is repaired and waiting for refinishing. The second room has the squeaky floor repaired but the hardwood floor remains ripped up. Plans A, B, C, have been exhausted. I’m trying to come up with a plan D.
As a consequence of the reclaimed flooring industry when a home is dismantled the floor is sold off as a lot. It usually comes from old farm houses, old schools and gymnasiums that are being taken down, and the square footage is in the 600 to 1000 square foot range. Usually it is sold to a new home contractor to be included in the construction of a new home. The remainder of unused wood eventually makes it into the second hand market and you’ll find lots of it in the 75-100 square foot range or maybe only a few boards from a mill at a time.
The room I’m trying to repair is only 160 square feet. Too large for the secondary market and too small for the primary market. It has been suggested that I am being held for ransom because of the unlikelihood I will ever find wood to repair the floor, to repair it currently would require just 25 linear feet, but I can’t find that anywhere in the secondary market. After a month of searching we found a supply of Holt lumber wood that had just gone on the market but was 360 square feet. During the process of negotiation weather I could buy just half of the supply, a builder came in and bought the whole lot. Since then I have found another supply of maple hardwood but no specifics of the dimensions or the mill were provided in the advertising. I’m in contact with the owner over craigslist, to get more information. He has 600 square feet, is located 90 miles away, and I have yet to hear back from him regarding the details of the woods origin and whether I can buy just 180 square feet. It’s been recommended that I buy 25% more then I need because there is always that much waste in reclaimed wood. Splits, broken tongues and grooves and the like.
I’m getting rather frustrated the project is taking this long. But feel it’s the right path, and will in the end, reduce waste that ends up in the landfill and restore one old house to a more original condition. Besides that, we love the look of maple. The kitchen we remodeled has maple cabinetry, the office furniture we bought has a maple finish and it would be too cool to have maple hardwood floors again. It would bring the house back together.
It’s the business practices of each company involved that create proprietary products that don’t work at all with each other that is behind the problem of a wasteful society. This notion of style and how it is constantly manipulated by advertising, dupes the consumer into buying that latest current style. Who knows how long a company will stay in business to support the proprietary products it sells, and they are constantly coming up with new products to replace last years models and it seems you can’t find a part to repair an appliance that is over 7 years old. It would be impossible to keep all the parts in inventory for repair when the products are changing this rapidly. This has little to do with what is good for a society, and everything to do with a companies bottom line and moving the profits up the supply chain to increase some individuals standard of living.
In the town we sail out of their is a property on a small island, that had a beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright style home on it. Someone purchased that property and built a 8,000 square foot home next to the original house, last year the FLW style home was demolished. The property sold for 6,000,000,000 dollars, and is inhabited by a single person. What is our society turning itself into? It is an age of excess, beyond anything imaginable, all the while the number of homeless is rising. Mental heath is deteriorating. The numbers committing suicide are staggering across all age ranges. And the amount of waste we create has become a staggering amount. We are trashing our rivers and oceans, making the air unfit to breath and the water unfit to drink. And our solution? Shorten the life cycle of products, make it too costly to repair them. Create such an unrealistic financial load on it’s population that no one has the time to do it themselves. Hire someone else and pay their bosses far more then it costs to do the job. Dig a hole and dump all the waste in it. And when the cost of land becomes too high here, ship our trash to third world countries where they are ill equipped to deal with it and it ends up in thier rivers and then in our oceans.
Our minds are being kidnapped and our livelihoods held for an exorbitant ransom with great cost to the planet. There is not such a thing as waste in nature, everything is recycled. How did man get itself in this predicament? It is time to change our practices. It is making us sick, mentally, physically and intellectually. Where are we heading and what can be done to change the course we are on?