Green Home Improvement Tip No.2

Use Recycled Materials

When we rebuilt our porch (a horrendous 70's mess which was falling over), we bought some lovely reclaimed brick from a salvage yard. They were four times as expensive as standard brick, but only a bit more expensive than 'aged' new bricks, and they look much nicer than either. From an eco-living point of view, reclaiming the bricks only used about 11% of the energy to make new bricks. This is fairly typical for recycled or reclaimed building materials. The roof tiles were recovered from the previous porch, so cost nothing in environmental (or economic!) terms.

As I mentioned before, the brickie hated working with them as they were quite uneven. He got off lightly though, as we didn't make him use lime mortar. Unfortunately this means that when our house is demolished, the bricks will be extremely difficult to recover once again - an oversight on our part.