Man Gives New Meaning to “Trashed” House

http://www.lockergnome.com/lumpy/2011/01/18/man-gives-new-meaning-to-trashed-house/

For those of you who are not certain what I mean by the term “trashed” house, it is easy to see one. Go to your local university and ask direction to fraternity row. Ideally, you want to do this early in the AM the night after what they call “social events”. However, based on my experience, most such dwellings remain “trashed” 80% of the time.

In the context of this article though, we must look elsewhere for these trashed houses. While one of these houses does actually have a Budweiser theme, I am talking about and entirely different type of house trash. For these type of trashed houses we must trek to a location, as described by the New York Times, a “sleepy Texas town, 70 miles north of Houston”.

That town, Huntsville, Texas, contains a few unique and different houses which are the work of Dan Phillips, founder of Phoenix Commotion. Mr. Phillips uses recycled building materials to create some fascinating houses. He started the company in 1997 and has completed 14 homes in Huntsville. Huntsville is the home town of this builder.

Mr. Phillips also set up a construction recycling center in 2004. There are no fees to drop materials off and it can be a tax deduction. Now contractors can recycle things like doors. I think that is pretty innovative. I do not know of anywhere else that a contractor could take materials removed from renovation projects. He even accepts and takes end cuts which he reuses in construction of recycled structures.

The NYT article reports that 80% of the materials are salvaged from other construction projects, from trash heaps and picked up on the side of the road. The final products are low cost homes built to target low income future owners. The Times reports the payments to be between 99 and 300 dollars a month. Unfortunately, half of them have been foreclosed on.

The foreclosed homes are being purchased by new owners and I can see why. They are some amazing homes. You can see one very active imagination in these buildings. In the construction of these dwellings he uses just about everything you could imagine (links are to Flickr images);

• license plates
• bone
• Budweiser Cases, same house also has a bathtub with a tap incorporated in the plumbing
• recycled cedar which is nice because it would normally end up in a land fill.. cedar does not rot so much as it weathers
• beer caps
• I don’t know what the roofing material is on this story book house but it looks like a story book illustration to me
• Amazing arrangements with broken pieces of stones and mirrors
• pop cans

If you are interested in learning more about Phoenix Commotion, you can check the blog which details some of this company’s projects. You may also enjoy the Flickr photo set of “Waste Management Chairs” and many others on the Phoenix Commotion Flickr Page.

Read more at LockerGnome