Nice topic stimulation, Sir James. I have taken several rural.small buildings totally apart. and re-constructed at inner city addresses. out house. smokehouse and windmills. (Once sold a old outhouse to a couple of Lesbians for the garden tools....or whatever) Anyway, Larger stuff such as Timber framed barns for the fun of it when I was younger and folks used to give them to you free for the taking. I worked with a demo contractor to de construct a roof and cupolo's of the Richmond State Hospital in Richmond, Ind. several years back. (4) Big 22' Onion domed cupolo's built out of 8' X 8' timbers,popular and Zinc/metal roof's with cool finials. situated 3 stories in the air, craned them down and horiz, transported down Hyw. 70 into Indps. to a local Architectural salvage company.....not sure he has ever sold any of them, but thought the 1890's coolness was worth saving. Roof was slate with 2" X 6" oak and 6 flat beds of of that & 8" X 8"s that were purchased by a southern timber buyer. Project was labor inificent even for 6 yrs ago or so. labor cost only differed from timber purchase by about $5000 or so to the plus, but I felt we delayed the demo contractor and I Now... know what that does to the slim profit margin in demolition. About 2 yrs. ago, a bid package came our way from a firm out east that was looking for a demo/dis-mantle contractor to take apart a distillary in Ky. 95% reclaimation goal....all the bricks and timbers Salvaged, transported back East and reconstructed for offices or houseing. We didnt bid....anybody familiar or know how that project went? I can not even remember the town in Ky. America loves small buildings and structures, I say let's recycle the whole structure but $ seems to say otherwise most of the time. Thanks for the interest James......great forum folks. Happy holidays.

We did a project of a old laundry building. We tore it down brick by brick and board by board. We salvaged all of the brick and all of the heart pine beams, rafters, and tongue and groove flooring through out. We lost our ass on it. We bid super cheap because we had a buyer lined up to purchase all of the materials from us and about 2 months into the job he wanted to cherry pick from the numerous stacks of salvaged materials. We ended up selling the antique brick for like a dime a piece and the heart pine for around .25 per board foot. It cost us more to take it down then we made selling it. If we could have just grabbed the brick with our excavator and loaded into our containers and taken it to our laydown yard and paid someone to chip, etc... but our laydown yard isn't zoned an inert landfill so dumping nonstacked brick would mean hefty fines if caught. So lessons learned. Never again unless its all under contract.