Paul Gardner recycles houses

By MARION SOFTKY

Before the bulldozers scraped down a charming house in old Palo Alto, designed about 1930 by the late Morgan Stedman of Skyline, Paul Gardner held a salvage sale over two weekends.

More than 800 people came the first day, says Mr. Gardner. They looked into every corner and bought appliances, and doors and steel-frame windows and bricks and the beautiful dark beams in the living-room.

What they didn't buy, including the mantelpiece, Mr. Gardner hauled to his new warehouse in East Palo Alto. The corrugated iron building is crammed with panelling and ironwork and sinks and elegant light fixtures -- almost anything that can be sold. A few doors up the street he has a yard full of lumber and thousands of Spanish roof tiles.

Some of this is good stuff with extremely valuable materials, he says, fondling a wrought iron garage door handle. "It's a crime it ends up in a landfill."

Mr. Gardner, a Palo Alto carpenter who abhors waste, is building a business that meets many community needs. His Whole House Building Supply helps reduce the waste going into rapidly filling landfills; it provides inexpensive and often unmatchable materials for homes; and it also provides jobs and resources for the struggling city of East Palo Alto.

The people working to promote recycling in San Mateo County are enthusiastic about Mr. Gardner's work. "Paul has one of the niche operations that can really create a unique way to increase diversion (from the landfill)," said Kathleen Gallagher, who manages recycling for 11 county jurisdictions served by BFI.

Mr. Gardner grew into his business, working as a carpenter during the 1980s and seeing the "phenomenal amount of waste." In 1991 he started a recycling newsletter, and in 1992, he began recycling houses.

Mr. Gardner has salvaged materials from houses all over the Midpeninsula, including many in Menlo Park and Atherton. Sometimes he even saves whole houses or sheds. "Tongans have shipped whole houses to the islands, where there's no lumber," he says.

Mr. Gardner's customers include architects, contractors, homeowners, artists, and theater people looking for sets.

At the Morgan Stedman house, still graceful despite holes in the roof and boarded windows, neighbor George Chiu and his son are happily digging up bricks from the back yard. Mr. Chiu has also bought windows, doors and rafters -- old-growth Douglas fir two-by-fours that actually measure two inches by four inches -- for a cottage he is building in the back yard of his Palo Alto home. "It's one of the retirement projects I always dreamed about," he says.



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