Shopping for Salvaged Materials

When we remodeled our house last year, we had intended to use quite a lot more salvaged building materials. But, it turns out, the city permitting process makes it pretty difficult. You can't just change a window size based on some excellent salvage score you've just found, because changes have to be reviewed by the Permit Dept. And it's not easy to find a salvaged item that is exactly the dimensions that you've drawn into the plan.

Therefore, in order to submit detailed drawings showing all the components of the building, we have to have all the salvaged items before we finalize the drawings! So, Sharon has been hunting around trying to locate and acquire the important salvaged materials for the garage project.

She actually found a nearly-new garage door in Eugene that was nearly identical to the one she had been contemplating ordering new! So, now we may be trekking down to Eugene on Friday to purchase that for our garage project.

We also went out to the Rebuilding Center and sifted through their doors. When we found more than one good option, we couldn't decide and didn't buy either. Now, though, we've picked which door and we're hoping it will still be there when we return tomorrow.

The windows are an especially difficult challenge. Most salvaged windows are white vinyl. We're trying to match the house and the house has green mullioned windows. We've read that you can paint vinyl windows, but you shouldn't paint light-colored windows with dark-colored paint because the vinyl breaks down under the heat of the sun. So, more than likely, we'll just end up ordering the same brand of windows we purchased for the house.

Or, if somehow we manage to find a pair of old single-paned windows that are close to the desired size and still have the frame on them, we'll go ahead and use them and paint them green. But we're still shopping around; we don't expect to get that lucky!

Update on Saturday: Here is our new garage design updated with our salvage finds! Now we just need to find windows, or resign ourselves to ordering them new.