Our friend Drew and I are warmed up after preparing and installing the window bucks, followed by the doors. We considered starting with framing work in the basement, but first need to organize some 2 by 4s.

I am proud to say that the only lumber that I bought at a regular home improvement store or lumber yard to date was the treated material for the bucks and a couple of plywood pieces way back when. The remaining 95% of material has all been salvaged and reclaimed lumber.

Not only does it help with our resource efficiency goal, it also assists with our rehab budget. I have been fortunate enough to find salvaged and reclaimed framing lumber for the fraction of the cost of new lumber.

It gets even better, because of the material we got for free! We salvaged a good quantity of old growth and nominal framing lumber during the deconstruction of the basement and 1st and 2nd floor. We de-nailed it, cut of the bad areas and split ends and then organized it by length so it was ready to be reused for the new basement framing.

Although this will keep us going for a while, my count showed that the stack was not enough to finish the job. It was time to make another trip to the ReBuilding Exchange, where I found more framing material for the basement job.

Earlier this year, the ReBuilding Exchange was overflowing with construction lumber. This time around, the lumber section looked somewhat empty and I learned that a lot of the salvaged lumber was bought up by various community gardens for their raised beds. I am glad to see that the reuse market is growing!

I loaded up enough 2 by 4s to finish the basement job, brought them home and slipped them through a front window into the basement. Now we are almost ready to go.

Despite all my bragging about the salvaged materials, I still have to make one trip to the lumber yard. I decided I need to buy a handful of cedar studs for the bottom plates on the concrete floor.

We are going to great lengths to manage and control moisture in the basement. That said, if there are any moisture issues (such as a spill) they would first show at floor level. Thus our proactive interest in using moisture resistant material, i.e. the cedar studs at the concrete floor to bottom plate interface.