Greeting Reuse Fans!
For frequent visitors to the store or our Featured Items page, you will hopefully have noticed that CJ is experimenting with what we call value added product, or “Constructed At The Junction” – that is where we take some donated materials and find a use for them in an end product that we design and make.
We choose our projects for a variety of different reasons, but most have to do with the basic premise that the raw material does not have recognized value (in and of itself), like a commercial slab wood door. Some material, like chalk board slate, is removed from salvage projects by our deconstruction crew in pieces of a size that most home owners are not equipped to manage. We have made tables from doors and we have used “slices” of commercial doors as framing for our chalk boards.
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There is also the challenge of finding value in “scrap/leftover” materials. We have explored this extensively with church pews, using them in the ceiling of the Community Room in the Project RE_ space and as paneling. Our most recent creation involves using the “left over” curved pieces from shortened church pews as the side panels of a book case, creating an expansive opening at the top of the case. Let us know what you think about this flared design. We welcome your feedback and suggestions on things we have made or things you would like to see us make.
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All of these projects are ideas generated by our staff and executed by the master carpenter who works with Project RE_, whose work is supported by grant funding. Your support of CJ’s value added products helps support our having a master carpenter in CJ/Project RE_ , who when he is not creating products, is working with and mentoring architecture students from the Urban Design Build Studio at CMU and apprentices from the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh, to impart skills needed in construction and design work.
