Customers entering Building Value in Northside are greeted by a yard of bathtubs, sinks and other home furnishings. It might seem like a graveyard for building materials, but these old home fixtures are awaiting a new life.
This is confirmed by the set of child-sized lawn chairs by the store entrance. Upon closer inspection it’s clear that the chairs are actually repurposed shopping carts. Inside, customers bustle around the store through aisles of cabinets, shelves and other furniture looking for a new home.
All of the goods available for purchase at Building Value are either donated by homeowners who no longer use them or salvaged from demolished homes. Anything bought here can be given a new life in another home rather than sitting in a landfill.
While two men get out a tape measure to see if their dream cabinets will fit inside their kitchen, the store cat Bella Value perches atop the checkout counter as the clerk asks a customer to sign a donation form.
“With or without the cat’s help?” he asks. Bella seems indifferent to the man’s signature as he signs off on the goods he donated to the store.
“Bella doesn’t actually itemize or give customers value for their stuff,” store manager David Daniels says. “She is on payroll to take care of the mice.”
Building Value’s main mission is to employ people with disabilities and other workplace difficulties and give them the training needed to obtain positions in the construction field that pay livable wages.
Those who complete Building Value’s training program develop basic deconstruction skills. They may then be hired by companies like Messer Construction, a partner of Building Value.
“A combination of our program and our store work hand in hand,” Daniels says. “The deconstruction part tears down buildings and brings it back to the store; the store sells it so that we can make money to fund our mission.”
Instead of completely knocking a house to the ground, Building Value works to take it apart piece by piece so that almost all parts are salvageable and able to be resold in the store. All proceeds benefit programs at Easter Seals, a nonprofit dedicated to creating opportunities for those with disabilities or disadvantages to realize their full potential. The tristate chapter of Easter seals founded the store in 2004.
“We’re trying to carefully remove items so that it can come here and get a second life as the same thing or maybe repurposed,” Daniels says. “Our biggest component here is how much stuff we divert from the landfill.”
The cheapest way to demolish a building is to completely raze it and dump all of the components into a landfill, Daniels says. Although Building Value does not demolish homes this way, having the service done by them may be comparable or cheaper because the items salvaged for resale are tax-deductible donations.
“The thing that separates us from another business is that all the material that comes back to the store is an actual tax write-off to the organization that offsets their bill,” Daniels says.
Daniels says Building Value will take the bricks, wood floors, windows, staircases, mantles and nearly any other part of a house. Customers could almost build a house from the store’s materials. While this provides a low-cost alternative for customers, it is also ideal for those who own older homes who may not be able to find the parts they need at stores like Home Depot or Lowe’s. Building Value’s inventory is more eclectic because it is sourced from donations and changes every week.
The customers who shop at Building Value are contractors, house flippers and those looking to repurpose old items — a group Daniels proudly calls “the Pinterest crowd.” Since the key to making money off these ventures is finding cheap materials, Building Value is an essential shopping destination for these customers.
Before Daniels became the store manager, he flipped old houses and was a frequent customer himself. He combines his skills from managing a Walgreens store with his knowledge of what homebuilders need to run Building Value.
“[At Walgreens] I was working a lot of hours, but I was never inspired,” he says. “This job inspires me — I come in on my day off every week.” Daniels says rather than working hard to help Walgreens profit, he is now working hard for a better cause. ”This store is a win-win situation,” he says. “The customers win, the company wins, the environment wins. Nobody is getting a bad shake out of this.”
For more information on BUILDING VALUE, visit buildingvalue.org.
