Scrap House

Recently, I attended a movie at my college called Scrap House. It was a documentary by Anna Fich created in 2005, detailing the creation of a house made completely from, well scrap. The house was made in honor of World Environment Day hosted in San Francisco around the same time.

The rules of Scrap House were simple:
1) Must be completed in 4 weeks.
2) No new material can be bought to build the house. Everything must be salvaged, with the exception of nails and screws.
3) The finished house must not only look great, but also comply to San Francisco's building codes which are some of the strictest in the States.

The head of the project was Building Inspector Laurence Kornfield, the main architect was John Peterson, the Scrap Guru was Flash, the Structural Engineer Han Bruskuvich, and last but not least John Pollard was the Contractor.

Scrap House itself was an insane idea to begin with. The plans were to build a modern two story house with 21 foot ceilings, a project that the team would of been lucky to finish in a year. They had a month. Not to mention they had to rely on the junk yards of San Francisco to fully build and furnish a house.

In the end, the result was a beautiful house. It was modern, gorgeous, and inspiring. Every part of the house was thrown away by someone else, yet all the pieces were beautiful and far from broken. It really makes one reconsider how we think of our trash. The amount of material that the US alone wastes in a year is astronomical. Did you know every building project buys 5% more windows than it needs? This alone results in thousands of dollars worth of unused, perfectly good double-paned glass that ends up in a landfill somewhere. Not to mention the amount of building material that is tossed when we tear down houses to build new ones. This team built an absolutely huge house, for next to nothing just by calling around and actually reusing what so many throw away.

Movies like this really make you think. Are we truly trying to recycle? Are we really taking every opportunity to actually use the raw material that we spend so much money trying to attain? Building projects of this caliber are far from impossible for the average person to imitate. Scrap House isn't the only project of its kind either. You'd be amazed at the amount of alternative housing options that are out there, that not only cost thousands less but are better for the environment.

We as a race cannot keep wasting the amount of resources that we do, and expect to be able to continue to live on this planet. Already our resources are running low, and our planet is dying. Its not irreversible, but it will be soon. If we want to continue to be able to breathe, we want to start rethinking how we live.

One man's trash can be another man's house.