When contractor Chuck Murphy bought a rundown warehouse on the west side of Colorado Springs last spring, he decided it would be the ideal recycling project.
He used discarded blocks, an old storefront from the Citadel mall, beams from a demolished steel bridge and rejected stair steps, transforming those items into one of the most enjoyable projects of his 36-year career.
“I did it for the challenge, and it really turned out to be a lot of fun,” says Murphy, owner of Murphy Construction, a local company that does a lot of renovation work.
“It was like working on a giant puzzle, trying to fit all the pieces together. Everyone really got into it.”
When Murphy took on the building, all that remained was a concrete floor and 14 buttresses that supported the walls before they collapsed in a snowstorm.
“Driving down the highway, this looked like a big beached whale with its ribs sticking up,” Murphy says.
It took about four months to renovate the building, but because he owned it there weren’t the same deadlines there would have been if he had been working for a client.
A mattress company leases the space and, according to Murphy, “it’s the best-looking building on the block.”
Murphy received an award from the Springs Area Beautiful Association for his efforts. He brought about the transformation by using ingenuity, and as many salvageable items from other projects as possible.
He used 8-inch concrete blocks rejected from other jobs to construct the walls. The blocks were structurally sound, having been tossed aside because the color didn’t match or they had small dings and chips.
Some blocks had been used in buildings that had been torn down; many were salvageable. Murphy stockpiled 8,000 of these blocks and used them all in the warehouse.
The stairs leading to the front of the warehouse were rejected from another job because they were too narrow. Murphy combined two sets of the stairs for a perfectly adequate stairway.
In its former life, the warehouse front served as a storefront in the Citadel mall. It was discarded when the store owners remodeled.
The steel beams that cross the ceiling were part of an old steel bridge. The glass blocks along the south wall had been discarded from an old Colorado Springs building and now give the warehouse an updated, classy look.
The roof, insulation and high-tech, energy-efficient lights were the only new items purchased for the building.
Murphy mixed up leftover paint in a 55-gallon drum. The result was a muddy gray paint that served as an exceptional primer.
“Doing this was like a great big scavenger hunt. It was much more fun than building from scratch,” Murphy says.
It also was a lot less expensive. Murphy estimates he saved at least 50 percent of the renovation costs by reusing materials.
“You’ve got to be willing to make the effort,” he said. “It’s more work than going out and buying everything, but it’s a lot more fun.”
Murphy isn’t the only one around town using recycled materials.
Cost and recycling were factors in construction of an eye-catching sign over Il Vinico, a newly opened restaurant on Tejon Street.
The restaurant is the only single-story building on the block, and the owners wanted a strong street presence so they wouldn’t be lost among the taller buildings.
The 25-by-8-foot sign incorporates a city street lamp post that was struck in a traffic accident. The lamp post originally was 35 feet; it was sheared off and now 29 feet of it are in use in the sign, says architect Mike Collins.
The aluminum panels in the sign and building were scrap from another project that was recycled into use for the restaurant.
