Townsman, 1992-03, Page 6Recycled beauty
Old buildings live on in a modern house
that combines the best of old and new
By Keith Roulston
"We get plenty of compliments on
the job we did of renovating our old
house," chuckles Dave Rapson as he
sits with his wife Sharon, chatting at
their kitchen table,"so I guess we must
have been successful at what we set
out to accomplish."
What the Rapsons set out to
accomplish at their Grey Township
house just south of Brussels, wasn't to
renovate an old house. They wanted
the best of a modern house, with the
kind of classic design of an older
home and the warmth of decades -old
materials. They've ended up with a
new house, light and bright and mod-
ern, yct with the feel of a turn -of -the
century traditional western Ontario
one and a half story home. They did it
by building a house that is made of
about 75 per cent of recycled materi-
als. Bits and pieces of their home
originated in con-
demned buildings all over southern
Ontario.
It was cost, not any environmental-
ly trendy philosophy that was behind
the Rapsons' decision to build a home
from reused building materials. They
had a very practical need to save
money.
The project began in the late sev-
enties, before they were even married.
Dave began designing the house they
wanted, even though he had no train-
ing except some high school drafting
courses. He had a look in mind, a tra-
ditional look that gave the conve-
niences of the current age. He was
careful about things like balance and
proportion and experimented for a
long time before he discovered the
pitch for the roof he felt looked prop-
er.
"We weren't trying to copy
another
house," Dave says. "We just wanted
to build a comfortable, easy to live in
house."
"Some older houses are disappoint-
ing when you get inside," Sharon
adds. "They can be cut up and awk-
ward to live in."
The house was built to their own
tastes. They wanted a home with Tots
of light and large windows.
After they settled on their design,
Dave began building the house part-
time, on weekends and in the
evenings. "It cut in to dating time",
Sharon remembers.
Faced with a tight budget, it was
perhaps only natural that Dave would
turn to materials recovered from
demolished buildings. He runs his
own company, Total Demolition, that
4 TOWNSMAN/MARCH-APRIL 1992