NORTHAMPTON — As he checked on the progress of deconstructing the old dairy facility that has stood at 23 Hooker Ave. since 1924, Adam Novitt reflected on how he and his wife, Priscilla Novitt, became enamored with the property.
“It’s sort of an anomaly,” he said from the site last Wednesday. “It’s really, at so many levels, just a neglected, run-down, unloved, real wreck of a place.”
Adam and Priscilla had planned to build an accessory dwelling unit on their property just a few doors away from No. 23, intending to keep Priscilla’s retired parents close to family and help them age in place. But the parcel at the end of the dead-end street caught the Novitts’ attention in January 2021 and they decided to contract with a Vermont company called Deconstruction Works to pull the building apart and recycle just about everything.
Now, they are going to build an approximately 1,200 sq. ft. retirement home, which they hope to eventually use themselves. There will be room on the lot for another 600- to 800-square-foot ADA-accessible home that the Novitts could rent or provide to other family members.
The couple’s offer on the property was accepted just days after Adam made one well-placed phone call.
“I called the listing agent, and she said that like 20 minutes before, the estate that owned this had authorized her to lower the asking price,” Adam said. “She said they were accepting best and final offers that weekend. It was really bizarre. … And then it took 11 months to negotiate the price down.”
The price needed to come down even more because the Novitts discovered a leak in an underground oil storage tank. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has given them until April 20 to remediate the environmental hazard, a deadline that is applying some pressure to the team that is slowly disassembling the building and carting it away to be resold through a Springfield nonprofit called EcoBuilding Bargains.
“You have to build in some buffer, some time for things to go wrong,” Priscilla said, so the crew, which comes to the site every morning from Brattleboro, Vermont, aims to be finished by St. Patrick’s Day.
The reusable materials include a rubber roof, wooden trusses, foam insulation, plywood, 2-by-12 joists and more. All of the doors, windows, lumber and siding will be reused, and shingles will be melted down to make road patches while small pieces of wood and wallboard are composted.
The remaining brick and concrete “will go into house foundations or fill or something like that. Virtually none of it will be waste,” Adam said. “When we signed the contract with Deconstruction Works, we donated all of those materials to EcoBuilding Bargains, so there will be a significant tax deduction. … At the bottom-line cost, it wound up being a couple of thousand dollars cheaper than just straight demolition.”
According to a history of the property written by Adam Novitt, director of Lilly Library in Florence, and shared online by Deconstruction Works, “The farmer Allen Houghton had a small farm in Amherst and in 1924 built a concrete block facility (at 23 Hooker Ave.) to distribute milk from. Allen’s farm and the milk run was called Hillcrest Dairy.”
Novitt said that when he learned about Houghton’s work as a milkman, he joined the National Association of Milk Bottle Collectors and used those connections to buy some of the original milk bottles used by Hillcrest Dairy.
After the dairy closed in the 1960s, the building sat vacant until it was bought by AR Conz Mechanical Contractors in the mid-1970s and run as a warehouse and office for more than 20 years. During this time, a second floor was added and other extensions were made before the building was rented by a painting company, an auto detailer and a taxi company.
“I took probably about 40 tires off the property. Some of them were partially buried in the yard, they were stacked up outside, they were inside the building,” Adam said. “People would just abandon things. … We took 45 cubic yards of trash out of here.”
Priscilla recalled finding two sets of golf clubs, two sets of cross-country skis and seven mattresses.
Erich Kruger, owner-member of Deconstruction Works, said the second level had open holes in the floor and there were no handrails for the stairs. The crew is getting ready to lift off the roof, which will require them to stand in the neighbor’s yard because the edge of the building is the property line.
“We’re kind of hoping that Mother Nature will give us a week of warm,” Kruger said. “It’s a lot of square footage to have open. … It was 5 degrees this morning, below. By the time we got here, it was probably zero.”
Deconstruction Works, Kruger said, is the only company in the area that provides such a service, and he’s been in the business for 17 years. Other projects are underway or have been completed in Northfield, Leverett, Vermont, New Hampshire and elsewhere.
“People know about us. All the material is marketed through Facebook,” Kruger said. “I would love to share this market with somebody else. We’re working on three projects right now, so I stretch my folks out. … There’s way more work than we could ever get to and a lot of great projects that we never even hear about.”
Homeowners buy most of the recycled material, he said, and there are several buyers who exclusively go through EcoBuilding Bargains and Deconstruction Works, which also strips out kitchens and bathrooms, and guts buildings in preparation for deep energy retrofitting.
Priscilla said Kruger rescued two bats from inside 23 Hooker Ave., a situation he’s encountered many times.
“I brought them to a wildlife rehabilitator in Cummington,” Priscilla said. “I brought them up there in a shoebox, and when I got home, the woman called and said, ‘Are you sure there were two bats in there? Because there was only one bat when I opened the box.’”
One of the bats had escaped inside Priscilla’s truck. Kruger found it underneath a seat, she said, “and I drove back up there.”
Inspired by a $10,000 grant that Lilly Library received from Grow Food Northampton to create a native plant garden and walking path, the Novitts want to create a similarly beautiful habitat at 23 Hooker Ave.
The goal is “to take this contaminated, trash-filled site … and make it a useful place for animals and wildlife,” Adam said.
The Novitts have hired the small-home company Backyard ADUs to build the new structures on the site. HIS & HERS Energy Efficiency in Williamsburg will work to limit the carbon footprint.
Brian Steele can be reached at bsteele@gazettenet.com.