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Instead of throwing out these materials, let’s see if we can use them in another area of your home. So, in the home that we’re currently working on, we took out the kitchen cabinets, gently, got them into the garage, sorted out what we could use, and then we put in a few base cabinets in the laundry room next door, and some upper cabinets. Bought some crown molding, finished them off, put some scribe molding on the side, stained it up, matches pretty doggone close, and I’ll tell you what, it certainly doesn’t hurt to be able to take something here and put it over here. It’s going to save you a few pennies, it’s not going to be tossed out into a landfill somewhere.
It’s a great opportunity to take something that really, generally, is in pretty good shape; it’s just it’s a little dated, so let’s maybe use it somewhere else. So, I find that a lot of our customers and hopefully some suggestions for you guys is take those cabinets out of your kitchen, move them in the garage, put them in the shed, move them to your laundry room, move them to the basement. If you’ve got a son or daughter that’s just bought their first place and have a little extra room in the house, hey, have them re-purposed. I’ll tell you what a lot of times when I go into homes for folks, they generally don’t utilize their garage as much as they can, so let’s take the cabinets out, let’s take some counter tops, let’s re-purpose them.
Hey, take that sink and move it from your kitchen to your utility room where you could probably repurpose one of the base cabinets. Go find a remnant piece of counter top, maybe a nice piece of granite remnant. Put it in your laundry room and get rid of that old kind of rickety, fiberglass tub because a lot of homes have those, and you want something where it’s a little more stable. Maybe put a big sink in there, be able to have cleaning products underneath and maybe utilize that space just a little bit more. So, that’s a great idea.
We’re taking from one and moving it to the other. In fact, that was one of the reasons like I said we’re talking about this tonight is, we did do that for the customer, and she loves it because now she had that little kind of rickety, fibreglass sink and really couldn’t utilize the space under it, and just being able to have it at the same level as her washer and dryer where we had it set in place, it really is kind of nice to have access to it. So, that’s a couple of areas I’d highly recommend. There again, your downside here possibly is let’s say please rip off carbon, put hardwood down, much easier to deal with. Yeah, I you know it’s funny because not in many of our remodeling projects we’re finding a lot of carpet; it’s usually stair runners going upstairs, but if we’re tearing up carpet we’re generally putting down wood floor, and looks great. Pricing has come down and wood flooring you will find that engineered floors are very cost- effective and very beautiful.
So, thank you for that, I appreciate that. So, let’s talk about using that extra cabinet in your sheds because a lot of guys have sheds in the backyard and they don’t have a place to store it. Also take a lot of the materials. We ran across the job where we got a number of toilets that were very gently used I would say, and somebody came and took them and re purposed them in an investment property, so there’s ways to take what you have instead of tossing it in the landfill and assuaging our conscience, feeling like we’re not doing any good by throwing it out in a dumpster and fulfilling in the landfill It’s certainly nice to be able to take that because there’s generally nothing physically wrong; it’s just a style, a color, they’ve lived in the house long enough that they want to change something. It really gets back to utilizing them for other purposes in your home.
I find that because sinks are not inexpensive, several hundred dollars for stainless steel, cast iron. They can they can get kind of pricey. Take that sink out of the kitchen or take it out of the bathroom and utilize it in another room. Save it, put it down in a basement where you’ve got an empty basement, you haven’t finished off your basement. Take those materials and re utilize them.
We’ve taken out windows and repurposed them, moved them to another section of the house. We’ve had it where people have taken out windows and used them on the inside of the house to almost make it look like they put a background painting on that was actually outside to make it look like the outside. It was really kind of neat, so there’s a ton out there. There are a few drawbacks you’re going to have to pay your contractor or take your time and gently remove these items.
You’re going to have to store them and maybe have to move them to another location, you know a storage unit or whatever, so there are some downsides to this. But I think the benefits really outweigh the negatives here I just find that you’d be surprised at how many places you can either reuse or find that somebody will be willing to reuse old cabinets, counter-tops. If you are having a remodeling project done and you have an old piece of granite in there, ask the stone guy, “Hey, will you take it I want to cut it down?” Sometimes for a nominal charge, they’ll take it back, they’ll cut it, you can put it in a place that you weren’t utilizing before. There’s a lot of ways to take some of the materials that are in your home and utilize them for other places.
So, I think that about covers it I think it was just because the fact that we get asked almost every job, is there any way we can do something with the materials we’re taking out instead of just throwing them out? So, it really gets back to how much work that you want to do and maybe some homework that you want to do.