Free Firewood For Your Own Use and Sale or Trade to Others

Last winter I switched to wood heat after seeing how expensive one month of heating oil cost. This year the heating oil is $1 MORE than it was last year so I've been keeping an eye out for firewood all year long.

In my last post I discussed how to get free or cheap wood stoves so you can check it if you want to add this to the sort of things you salvage and recycle.

I'm lucky in that I live in a rural Western county and I am able to collect dead or fallen trees from nearby National Forest lands. Over the Spring and Summer my wife and I did haul in around 5 cords of cedar, pine and fir plus a small amount of oak. The cost for the permits here is $10 per cord. A cord, for those who don't know, is a stack of split firewood 4 feet by 8 feet by 4 feet or 128 cubic feet. At my elevation in the Sierra Cascades most folks burn around 5 cords per year.

As I did my salvage work I always had my eye out for firewood. Almost everywhere folks have trees fall down and evey time I see one, I stop and ask for it. Most of the time the folks say yes take it away or, if they burn wood themselves, I offer to split it with them if I do all the cutting into rounds (they split). I've gotten quite a bit of wood this way.

Another way I've gotten firewood is as a byproduct of my recent building salvage for used lumber. I've ended up with quite a pile of broken, warped and short pieces of lumber that makes great firewood and kindling.

Also, recently, I did a gigantic cleanup of all sorts of miscellaneous material from an estate sale. There were several acres of forest and as I made my rounds picking up various things I noted many downed trees. Near the end when it was clear to the folks that I would be doing what I said and take everything, I asked if I could take the downed trees if there was time. They agreed so I made sure I had time to do so. My last 3 truck and trailer loads was all nice dry firewood logs. I cut to a length that I could handle myself to save time and then cut into rounds and split at home.

So now I've got about 10 cords of dry firewood. 4 or 5 for myself and the rest for the following year or to trade for something else I can sell or use myself.

Good Luck

www.RecyclingSecrets.com for Free Home Based Salvage and Recycling Information Including: Metals, Deconstruction and Used Building Materials, Gold and Precious Metals and E-Waste. Check out: How to Make Money in the Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business

Estate Sale Cleanups Equal Big Profits

There never seems to be an end to new opportunities in this business. Recently a friend came over and said "you gotta get over there." He had gone to an estate sale the previous weekend and went back the Monday after to pickup a few things he had purchased. The people had 3 days left to dispose of all the stuff that didn't sell. So my friend told them about me. I drove over right away and was amazed - lumber of all sorts, plumbing and electrical supplies, firewood, large timbers, an old railroad trestle in parts, irrigation pipe and tubing, drip systems, fencing, roofing, gas cans full of gas, railroad rails... on and on. As usual, I said "I can do it."

I did "do it." Working 20 hours a day, I made 14 trips with my pickup and 12 foot trailer (I borrowed the trailer from a friend). Retail value of what I collected has to be in the $20,000 range. I'll end up using about 1/2 of it and expect to sell the rest for around $5,000 cash or similar value in trade for things I need or can sell.

The above is not that unusual for me although I'd never cleaned up an estate sale before. I've been in this community for just a bit over a year and already folks are seeing me as the "salvage guy." it's all word of mouth and reputation. Do a great job for someone and they'll find more deals for you.

www.RecyclingSecrets.com for Free Home Based Salvage and Recycling Information Including: Metals, Deconstruction and Used Building Materials, Gold and Precious Metals and E-Waste. Check out: How to Make Money in the Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business

How I Get the Material I Need and Make Money Tearing Down Old Houses

Last week a friend of a friend told me about an old house that the owner wants torn down. I went over and took a look. It's small - about 24 feet by 18 feet - single story home. It was built back in the 1930s and is in very poor shape, but the lumber is good.

I did some figuring on its value - the cost for materials at today's prices and came up with the following:

• The house is all douglas fir. It has shiplap siding that can be used as is or planed. The subfloor, ceiling and inside walls are all solid 1x12. It's a stick frame house so there are lots of 2x4 in walls and roof. There are 2x8 floor joists and the roof is solid sheathed in 1x12 lumber. All in all I come up with about 4400 board feet - today's value on the West Coast is about $1600.
  
  
• I actually want to use quite a bit of it to enlarge my shop at home so I'll be using a sawzall and taking portions of walls intact, but if I were to tear down the entire building piece by piece, I figure one person could do it in 4-5 days. 2 good workers could do it in 2-3 days. So, if I were to hire labor to do it, I'd be looking at about $800 -$1,000 cost for lumber valued at $1600. Note though that this is used lumber, but also of much better quality than is available today. If I tore it down myself, the cash out of pocket would be much less.
  
  
• The house has heavy corrugated aluminum roofing over the solid wood sheathing. Scrap value of this is about $200. The wiring is the old style single wires on posts - very easy to strip - worth about $150 - $250.
  
  
• And then there are the fixtures, switches, hardware, windows, doors... worth many hundreds of dollars.
  

The way I figure it - it's a good money maker. Most likely enough in scrap metals and miscellaneous non-lumber items to pay the labor costs so the lumber is basically free and can be used (what I'll do with most) and/or sold quite readily. I could price it for about 25% less than market value and it would sell quite quickly - in these times, everyone is looking for a bargain!

So, check out your friends, your town, start looking around. I'm in a very lightly populated county of only 20,000 people and I find more deals like this than I can handle - mainly just through word of mouth.

If you want to learn more about this and how I got into and stay in the salvage and recycling business, check out RecyclingSecrets.com and my ebook, How to Make Money in the Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business.

Best of Luck

Mike

www.RecyclingSecrets.com for Free Home Based Salvage and Recycling Information Including: Metals, Deconstruction and Used Building Materials, Gold and Precious Metals and E-Waste. Check out: How to Make Money in the Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business

Plans for buildings, cabins, homes, sheds, greenhouses and more with used lumber

Early on in the salvage and recycling business I made a good living getting free or very cheap building materials and lumber. You'll find more about deconstruction and lumber and building material and reuse here. And it's gone into in more details in the ebook, Home Based Salvage and Recycling Business Manual.

Now there is a whole bunch of plans that will help guide you in making various stuctures - cabins, homes, barns, greenhouses, etc. - with the lumber and building materials that you collect. Check out the Free Self-Sufficiency Building Plans
for Farm, Ranch & Homestead at ToolsForSurvival.com.

Best of Luck,

Mike

Salvage Lumber Success in Petaluma: $700,000 in three years

Salvage Lumber Success in Petaluma: $700,000 in three years

12/17/2009 There's big money in salvage lumber. This fellows success reminds me of how well I did in the deconstruction business. I often found that when I tore down an old building or structure - that I usually got for free or was paid to tear down - I would have all or most of the material sold before it ever hit the ground. I'll be including more about my experience in deconstruction and building material salvage in upcoming realeases of my Gold from Electronic, Telecommunication & Computer Scrap: Experiences from the Field. Please check my Deconstruction, Recycling and Reusing Lumber and Building Materials pages for more articles and inspiration.

Read about making $700,000 in three years in the salvage lumber business