Reduce, Reuse…

Have you ever driven past the construction site of one of those cookie cutter neighborhoods where there is three basic house styles for an entire neighborhood?
There is a lot of construction waste – specifically the wood. You’ll see it in piles, often left out in the weather, quickly becoming unusable.  We’ve had it on our site too as the second story was made with standard materials.  And I hate it.  We had tried to save the scrap and covered it but not living on site we weren’t there to secure the tarp down when high winds ripped it off the wood thus thwarting our efforts to decrease waste.

But the first story made with the Faswall blocks has very, very little leftover block material which is great for some good reasons:

• The calculations for the building were right on, cementing (pun intended) our confidence in the company and plans for future work together.
• Money is not wasted on unused blocks.
• That extra block wasn’t paid for on the transport up to the site (from a different state in our case.)
• We’re not paying to get rid of “extra” material.

Did you notice how money was mentioned more than once there?   Yeah, it’s something to consider when exploring types of building materials you’ll be using (or not as the case may be).

We have a few ideas of how we’re going to use the leftover bits.  Here’s what I’ve started with so far.

Filler for my raised bed boxes.  So the dirt I’m sifting and compost I’m adding doesn’t spill out the bottom.