By: Ken Edelstein
The fluted flooring now installed at the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design has a story to tell, and it’s not just about the wood.
Actually, the wood part is quite interesting. Salvaged two-by-fours contributed half the lumber used for nearly 500 floor panels throughout the building.
But it’s the human side of the story that will make you feel good.
As is common when one re-purposes salvaged materials, putting together those floor panels was bound to require a lot of labor. At first, Skanska was looking for one company to assemble the nail-laminated panels along with the building’s other structural wood. Suppliers were happy to bid on fabricating the glue-laminated posts and beams that form most of building’s skeleton. But they weren’t eager to take on the floor panels.
“Any time you have salvaged materials, any (subcontractor) is going to have questions about the quality of it,” Jimmy Mitchell, the Skanska USA project manager who’s shepherded many of the unique features of the Living Building on the Georgia Tech campus.
How could the wood fabricators be sure that the used two-by-fours weren’t warped or broken? What if there wasn’t enough good wood among the salvaged material? How much time would it take for quality control?
Mitchell was confident of the quality. The bulk of the two-by-fours came from Atlanta movie sets, where they were used just used once, then salvaged by the Lifecycle Building Center, a nonprofit that specializes in culling materials for reuse. Plus, the two-by-fours were really only needed as spacers within floor panels where the two-by-sixes would provide the structural support. But all that’s still different from the systematic grading by a mill of virgin lumber.
“The industry is set up where you put together a bid package, and you hit send, and you get your bids back,” Mitchell says. “On this project, you sometimes don’t get a bid back because you’re asking them to do things that are unusual.”
Read More >> https://livingbuilding.kendedafund.org/2018/12/17/georgiaworks-construction-training-provides-path-toward-equity/
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