Quote Originally Posted by Hamtragedy View Post
Many of these old houses not only have oak trim, and flooring, [[not to mention, most of these kitchens and bathrooms built before 1925 have maple flooring), but dimensional oak joists [[true 2x8s) and 1" thick oak subfloors, [[really, not 3/4"). Don't tell me there is no market for old oak. Most the houses on the east side have mahogany trim, usually 3/4 or thicker by 8".

Another shame on Detroit is that all these beautiful houses are only selling for 30K and no one wants to buy them, but that all this "unwanted" lumber is winding up in landfills. And I see them every week.

Fuckin' shame.
Sorry, you're dreaming. A lot of that old wood is not worth salvaging. I pulled up hardwood floors before from an old building. Not only are the surface of the floors normally heavily scratched up and warn from the years, but a lot of times there's splinters along the edges from warping over decades and multiple sandings. Then, there's all those 4-5 inch diagnal nails that held it together that cause you to split a lot of the tongue and grove from the hardwood as you're pulling it out. It's time consuming pulling out all the nails and the old wood breaks very easily. Underneath, you don't have 3x5' spruce subfloors, but planks which you can't use in a new building. The 2x4s from the walls have so many nails in them that the Habitat restore won't accept it and it's really time consuming to pull out the nails just to donate it to Habitat and nobody shows up if you post ads on to try to sell it for 10% of what it costs new. The only thing worth salvaging were the kitchen cupboards. I got fed up with storing it and 95% of that wood I ended up throwing into the dump and paying their dumping fee.

It sounds good in theory, but try doing it yourself and you'll see it's not worth the effort unless you're a retiree with a pension and lots of free time on your hands. But, if you have to earn a living and pay the bills, it's just not worth it and that's why you see so much lumber ending up in landfills. Believe me, if there was a way to make a living off of this, people would be doing it.

You know what the best thing to do with all that old building debris? Pile it up in one end of the city, mix some dirt in with it and make a really nice local ski hill with it to help local tourism.