SANIERUNG & HISTORIE 

Summer 2015 - Our Vision is to preserve the heritage of the building and inspired by cradle to cradle principles re-use as many elements as possible AND make the building as flexible as possible for any future use.

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Summer 2016 - 

After an intense planning phase and getting the approval of Department for historic Landmarks we started working in early Summer 2016. We decided to re-use  as much materials as possible, e.g. rainwater pipes, the roof tiles, windows, doors and even stones.

The contractors first reaction of "throwing away the old stuff" and "replace everything by new materials" was our biggest challenge. We use local contractors, and instead of replacing with low-cost-country materials & products we rather spend the money on local labor hours to get everthing repaired and adapted. Our fist positive economical footprint in the Region!

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Fall 2016 - true renovation starts

We faced some (expected) suprises when digging into some details. For instance we needed to renew insulation against water on 35m of the building because of an inappropriate previous quality of works performed 15 years ago.

Our Cradle to Cradle (C2C) philosophy needs daily attention because contractors have minimal understanding of the topic. Also, it seems to be more difficult than initially expected to find C2C compliant/certified materials. Drain water pipes were built in by cotractors within a day without any focus on materials used - even though we had three briefings on that upfront. Lucky enough: they picked PVC free material, so at least we're compliant on that side.  Or, for our ventlation for instance, cradlevent does not seem to be designed for smaller rooms - so we'll use alternative solutions. Some other companies with C2C certified materials do not answer multiple requests for price quotations, e.g. for Floor material. From our perspective a real challenge for the C2C idea to Progress. But we keep going!

Re-Use of windows and doors is progressing very well, we seem to make it with a minimum of waste and high proportion of repair effort vs. buying new stuff.

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cradle to cradle becomes reality - Some Highlights: Rheinzink material used for Roof gutters (C2C certified). We found flooring wod (massive, no compund material) with PEFC certification https://pefc.de/; the previously installed steel door for the room with heating Equipment was repaired instead of replaced, only lime plaster is being applied.