It's advisable when you are starting a brick n mortar small retail business to look for one that is ready to go, and does not need a lot of work, such as a remodel, to work for your situation. ESPECIALLY if you are trying to launch a Zero Waste & Sustainable store which has an even higher risk of failure.
We knew that when looking at spaces for Zieros.
We passed on the space we are at the first time we looked at it because it needed a lot of work to get it to where we could open up shop. It was not in our budget to do so either.
However, after looking at lot of spaces and meeting a lot (almost all of them) of unfavorable potential landlords, we thought about 2810 in a different way: A challenge to sustainably remodel it.
And so we pitched the idea to the landlord, they accepted, and we were off to the races! ...Turtle races, as that's how fast things moved.
Here are pictures of the shop from the first day we signed the lease, until we had our intro products on the shelves and open for business (not current pics) (side by side video exists on our youtube channel):
It was a totally nuts and highly unwise business decision. But a fantastic idea from a sustainable mind set! (At least to us.)
From our perspective it screamed: "this could be a challenging example of what can, and cannot be done from a sustainable stance for a remodel of this size! What a potential learning experience!"
We also knew that almost no one else would attempt to do what we were planning because of the amount of proposed work, and how we would do the work. Mostly because they would have just tossed everything away, and used basic toxic/unsustainable items to fix it back up.
And so it was our challenge to take on!
The hardest part about the entire process wasn't even the work. It was dealing with some of the people we chose to work with (Edward D. Smith, the guy who made our drawings), and forced to work with (MDIA, The ADA person specifically). We highly recommend you DO NOT use either. But that is an entirely different story.
Our goal was to salvage everything we took down, apart, and reuse everything possible, donate everything else, and replace what we could not reuse with long lasting sustainable solutions. We hustled, wheeled, and dealed...until we ran out of time. We failed on a hand full of things. More than we would have liked.
But that's what we signed up for. The Challenge. The Successes. The Failures.
To Make it clear, we did not demolish the space. That's the standard practice that needs to change via policy. We "Salvaged" the space the best ways we knew how.
TRIM & CARPET
All of the trim from the walls and floors was the first thing we took apart. We reused the floor molding when we put everything back together. A couple pieces of corner wall molding was reused as a gap filler behind the counter in the back of the space. All other trim, minus a hand full of small unusable scrap & broken pieces, were donate to Construction Junction (CJ), The Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse (PCCR), and a few people off of craigslist.
The carpet, we thought, would never find a reuse home. However, a guy from craigslist came and snatched it up for a second life!
WALLS
All of the walls were covered with wallpaper, which was mostly falling off and apart. We took all the loose parts down, but left the pieces that were genuinely stuck to the walls/on the walls to paint over later. You can see this in the photos above, and when you visit our shop.
More than half of the walls (65-70%?) we took down were either panel, wood, or hard board. All of them (see media page for more pics), with the exception of the wood panels (which we made the checkout with) and a few small sections that had water damage from a leak years back, where donated to CJ, and smaller pieces to PCCR. That was almost a full pickup load!
A heavy-as-hell board of some sort was used as a "cork" board type of space to pin things to. This was donated to CJ.
The other wall boards (that we took down) were made from drywall. We did our best to pass this drywall, most of which was still in usable sheet condition, onto another project. But we could not find anyone to take it, thus we failed at this. We couldn't compost it because it had wall paper, or wall paper glue on it. (Clean drywall that is free of any foreign material and asbestos can be composted.)
So the drywall made up about 85% of the material we disposed of at the landfill when we finished. It was disappointing.
WOOD BEAMS
Once we got the space down to the 2x4 beams, we took them all down, apart, and pulled and drilled out all the nails & screws. We reused almost all of the beams to make our shelving: we split them lengthwise, and reused whatever screws we could from the salvage.
We also reused full 2x4s to make the checkout, along with the salvaged wood panels mentioned previously.
The rest of the wood beams —small cuts, and a couple gnarly beams— were used to make smaller "box" stackable shelving, as well as donated to CJ and PCCR.
CEILING
Once the space was cleared, we got to work on repairing the ceiling. Because we removed walls, there were long gaps in the drop ceiling where tiles needed to go back in. We salvaged as much of the existing tiles, and metal used to hold the ceiling up. However, we needed more tiles. And a lot of the metal was unusable given what it was used for, and the condition it was it.
We recycled the gnarly metal pieces, donated the usable stuff to CJ, and disposed of the broken and unusable ceiling tiles. Which made up almost the rest of the materials we took to the landfill.
Ceiling tiles, most of them anyways, are reusable, and compostable. However, we could not find someone to compost them. And they were too small or broken to use in the space.
We used new metal pieces, tiles, screws, wire, and hooks to fix the ceiling. It was a challenge in certain places as whoever put the drop ceiling in originally, didn't line it up correctly from the front of the shop to the back. When you look at the finished fix, it's offset just after the checkout as you walk in. There was no way around this besides taking an entire portion of the ceiling down. And that was not at all an option.
WINDOWS
The windows in the space were old metal. We did not replace these, but the landlord did. We did however pass these metal frames onto a scrapper to recycle them. Otherwise they would have been pitched.
PAINT
We searched high and low for a sustainable, truly plastic free (no PVA) paint. We ended up narrowing it down to Lime, Milk, and Recycled Paint.
- Lime wouldn't work given it's application method for our purpose (but we would highly recommend it as a sustainable paint!).
- Milk Paint wouldn't stick to all the surfaces we wanted it to. (But again, a highly recommended sustainable paint if it works for your situation!)
- And Recycled paint is a great option, that we recommend if it works for you. However, there was no way to tell the VOCs of the paint as it was mixed with all sorts of other variations.
We (thankfully!) found Sinopia paint out of California. They make a Milk-Oil hybrid paint that is VOC free, plastic free, that can go across almost any surface with no prep, and can be safely washed down the drain or dispersed outside as it's free of all the bad stuff.
It's the best paint that we have found. No question, hands down. We painted everything in our shop with it. We highly recommend it for all your wall (plus) projects!
FLOORING
The floor underneath the carpet was at least 2 (maybe 3) layers of tiles that hadn't seen the light of day for probably 25-30 years. It was not able to be left as is.
Our options after research for the most sustainable floor were Bamboo, Cork, Linoleum, Marmoleum, and Reclaimed.
Don't EVER use vinyl for flooring. This is awful stuff. There is no such thing as "Luxury" or "sustainable" vinyl flooring. You are being fooled and ripped off.
Given our budget (and skills set): we couldn't afford bamboo; Cork was too soft for a commercial space; Reclaimed was our first choice, but we couldn't locate enough of it/in the size we needed, to fit our space; Linoleum glue down tiles took too much excess materials; So we went with the Cinch Lock Seal Marmoleum by Forbo. It was so easy to install, and it was the most sustainable option given our situation. And besides the plastic strip at it's edge used to hold the pieces together, this board is both highly reusable given it's aesthetic, and per Forbo, compostable at it's end of life.
RAP UP
After the floor, we put back the floor and wall trim that we salvaged and painted. Assembled our shelving/checkout using the salvaged 2x4s/wood panels mentioned previously. In additional to new wood sheets purchased for the shelving decks, with 2 of them being salvaged.
To top everything off we hung a used cork board gotten at CJ, laid down a used jute/wool entrance carpet, along with a few second hand shelving units and other odds and end.
And finally, our total trash from our remodel was within a single 6ft pickup trucks bed, at a bit over 300lbs, all under a tonneau cover. Items consisted of; dirt, debris, mask filters, rubber gloves, boxes of drywall, ceiling tiles, wallpaper, as well as a couple pieces of broken PVC piping, carpet, and a rotten wood beam or two.
And that's our adventure in remodeling this space... in a nutshell!
