After I inherited the house my dad was born in, my husband and I decided that its austere gables, excellent lumber, large side yard, and perfect southern exposure made it a good candidate for renovation.

However, the garage was in the wrong spot, so we decided to move it. As it turned out, this process was a little like “beam me up, Scottie” because the garage was not only moved, but also transformed into a carport. Given that the house is on a corner lot providing access from either street, we decided it was better to store our cars on the relatively dark, north side so we could free up the sunny west side of the house for gardening.

You’d expect that removing a 20-by-20-foot garage would create a big pile of debris, but that didn’t happen because we painstakingly dismantled it, stick-by-stick, and ended up with only a standard-size grocery bag of waste. Here’s what happened:

The roof was still clad with the original No. 1 western red cedar shingles. They make great fire starter, so we neatly stacked them in a dozen boxes. The inevitable small bits and broken pieces filled seven or eight wheelbarrow loads and became compost under evergreens in the yard. The roof’s split sheathing was very difficult to remove. Most of it broke and ended up sawed into lengths for firewood and stacked on the north edge of the carport with other firewood.

Part of the problem was the galvanized 16-penny nails my dad and his uncle used to build that garage in the first place. To make it worse – or better, depending on your point of view – where one or two nails would have done nicely, they used three or four. During the dismantling, we joked that the spirits of my dad and Uncle Eric were chuckling at our efforts to be as careful in deconstructing as they were in building.

The beautifully weathered shiplap that sheathed the walls was carefully removed with a sawzall (a reciprocating saw) and used to side the new shop. Even the old garage windows and one of its side-hinged doors were re-used in the shop, which now looks like an old building that suddenly sprouted on the site.

The two-by-four rafters, stud walls and ceiling joists came out more readily. Looking at them, I asked my husband, “Are you taking me to Hawaii?” – I figured 20-foot-long, clear-grain Douglas fir, milled 60 years ago, would probably fetch enough to buy a pair of plane tickets. He responded “If we have them milled into trim, I’m sure we’ll make more than enough, given what people pay now for wood like this. And these are all stamped ‘utility.'” Since then, we’ve re-used some of this lumber in other construction projects, often exposed as interior trim.

Finally, the sill plates. Part of the problem with the garage was a leaky roof and a high water table. Only blocks from the Columbia River and a mile from the Pacific Ocean, the house gets 90 inches of annual rainfall. These conditions combine to create a floor that’s damp and slick throughout the winter. The four-by-six sill plates, again of clear-grain fir, took the brunt of this. None survived without rot, but many pieces were solid enough for use as firewood.

You might have noticed that I’ve yet to mention a dump run. That’s because there wasn’t one. The old electric fixtures and wire were the only “trash” and easily fit into a grocery sack. The nails we pulled were recycled along with some bits of flashing.

Even the concrete pad was re-used. We had a mason cut it into 18-by-32-inch blocks, which we used to build raised garden beds. Even after paying the mason for his labor and diamond saw blade, we came out ahead, saving about $300 compared to the cost of hiring someone to break it into pieces and haul it to the transfer station. If we lived in a metropolitan area, we might have made money on it, since old concrete can be turned into beautifully crafted garden walls.

Ours was a do-it-yourself effort, but over the last ten years, deconstruction services have proliferated all over the U.S. as material re-use has become more valuable. Locally, Trails End Recovery (www.trailsendrecovery.com) has dismantled the old Safeway, Lewis and Clark School, and Pier 3 in Astoria. In Portland, the Rebuilding Center (www.rebuildingcenter.org/deconstruct) offers deconstruction services as well as used construction materials.