Paint scraping is therapeutic, but not all the time. It is the kind of labor that allows one to contemplate other things as well as the task at hand. When the cracks get deep and the plaster begins to crumble, my thoughts turn to recycling. Reusing screws. Reusing containers and plywood. Repurposing metal shards found on the street. What is good sense, and what is the folly of "penny wise pound foolish?"
I have worked for some years now doing various renovation projects in and around NYC and one of the goals, aside from doing a first rate job for the client of course, has always been to use less stuff. In the building industry there is a huge amount of waste, almost by necessity. Even in a so called green building project, there is waste from cast off and excess material, worker error, and many other sources. Certainly the effort to curtail waste is there in any building effort, from the smallest paint job to the tallest skyscraper. It just makes sense from a cost standpoint to at least make an attempt to avoid waste. Where this attempt goes too far is where my thoughts reside. Does it make sense to sort screws after their third use? When do used, bent nails and rusty steel studs become waste? When does the sorting of used material become too expensive and time consuming?
When I was a kid I had a copy of Furman Bisher's "Strange but True Baseball Stories," a wonderful anthology style book for young readers. There were some great stories in there; Johnny Vandermeer's double no hitters, Pete Grey's five one armed major league homers, but the one that really stuck with me I have forgotten the baseball aspect of. The story was about home run king Hank Aaron, and it starts off biographically, with a great description of his childhood which in part involved working building the family house with his father. One of his jobs was straightening nails for reuse. In their situation the Aarons simply had to do this as well as many other salvage operations in their house building efforts because, at least according to the story, they were very poor.
To me there are good reasons to salvage and reuse stuff. Obviously if you need materials and supplies and you have no other recourse, you do what you must. Certainly there are sound environmental reasons to do these things as well. Aesthetics may also come into play depending on the project. However, there are some materials that are readily salvageable and then there are some things that we maybe oughta just pitch. In my own work, at a certain point it is not possible to make a living if we salvage every last little screw and scrap of wood and wallboard. The effort becomes a waste of time, and therefore money, both in the actual salvage effort and in the attempt to use, for instance, a bent or stripped screw; and cobbling together some Frankenstein renovation likely will not serve the client’s needs.
Really for us on the job it comes down to a balancing act of waste, conservation, labor and materials cost, and time. Strip it to the bones and build it new with max waste or patch it and nurse it back together with minimum waste. Which way do we go? What is cheaper? What takes longer? I imagine this holds true for many if not all industries, businesses, and ventures for profit and not for profit. From the biggest oil company to the smallest, yurt living, off the grid family, there is concern for efficiency and savings. Savings of money, time, supplies and materials. What I come back to usually in my distracted musings (wasting time) is a kind of dream of utopia where salvage and conservation are practiced and taught at all levels of society. The reality seems to be however that the effort may not always pay off: it is always possible to go way the heck over budget salvaging crumbly soggy wallboard and messing about sorting effin’ screws.