Cold air rushed through gaping holes as volunteers pulled the windows from a home on Adams Street on Monday. The volunteers worked quickly, removing doors, windows, trim, cabinets and other materials and loading them into a trailer bound for River Cities Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Marinette.
Oconto County partnered with River Cities to help empty the homes that will be demolished this spring and summer to make room for a law enforcement center.
Michelle Drees, ReStore manager, said anything that can be repurposed will be removed from the 12 homes scheduled for demolition. The materials will be sold at the ReStore, with the proceeds used for the Habitat for Humanity houses and other projects.
River Cities builds and refurbishes homes in the Marinette and Menominee, Michigan, area. The organization is rehabbing a house in Menominee and will start another home this summer.
Drees said Habitat services haven’t been offered in Oconto County because the county doesn’t have a Habitat for Humanity chapter.
Drees wasn’t sure how much revenue the store would generate from the sale of the salvaged materials, but said money isn’t the only reason ReStore strives to recycle whatever possible.
“A key point is that it’s not going to the landfill,” she said.
According to Drees, ReStore saved 132,000 pounds of materials from the landfill last year.
“If we can save it from the landfill and make money for Habitat, that’s a good thing,” she said.
Helping a customer find something they can use is also rewarding, she said, recalling the elderly woman who bought kitchen cabinets at ReStore.
“She got them, and she was so excited because this is the first time in her life she was going to have kitchen cabinets,” Drees said. “The stories you hear are neat.”
But not everyone is shopping for essentials. Drees said Pinterest has inspired individuals to use ReStore materials for all sorts of projects, such as dragonflies made from ceiling fan blades.
Among the roughly 20 volunteers working in the home Monday were six building construction students from Oconto High School and their instructor, Joe Hietpas. The class usually meets for a two-hour block, but Monday was a field trip day, allowing students more time to volunteer.
“We thought it’d be good for the kids to experience some charity work and see how they constructed old houses and how to dismantle properly,” Hietpas said.
Students removing windows found metal window weights, prompting Hietpas to tell them the history behind the weights before the students removed the replacement windows that the homeowner had installed at some point.
Pete Stark, of the Oconto Historical Society, said the oldest two or three of the 14 homes on the north block were probably built in the late 1860s or 1870s, but none have particular historical significance.
“The most historical thing about that block is that the Merline family owned several of the older homes at one time or another,” he said.
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