Salvage and recycling: what your old house is worth

An old house isn't just a demolition cost — it's a pile of materials, some of them genuinely valuable. Up to 90% of demolition material is recyclable, and on the right house, salvage returns $800–$12,000. Here's what's worth money, what isn't, and how to make sure the value lands in your quote instead of quietly leaving on someone else's truck.

What's actually worth money

• Scrap metal — the reliable earner. Steel roofing and framing, gutters, hot water services, copper pipe and wiring, cast-iron baths. Copper is the standout per kilo; a whole-house strip of copper and steel reliably returns hundreds to a couple of thousand dollars.
• Red bricks. Solid clay bricks from pre-1970s homes clean up and resell at roughly 50c–$2 each — a double-brick or solid-brick home can hold 8,000–15,000 of them. The catch: bricks laid in hard cement mortar (most post-1950s) often won't clean economically; lime-mortar bricks from older homes are the prize.
• Hardwood. Regional Victorian homes were framed and floored in timbers you can't buy today — messmate, red gum, oregon in spans, baltic pine boards. Recycled timber yards pay real money for straight, de-nailed stock, and demand keeps rising.
• Character fixtures. Claw-foot baths, fireplace surrounds, leadlight, solid doors, pressed-metal ceilings. Individually modest, collectively worthwhile — and often best sold by you privately before demolition, where you keep 100%.

What's worth less than people hope

• Modern brick veneer bricks — cement mortar, low resale, usually crushed instead.
• Pine framing from post-1970s homes — recyclable, not valuable.
• Anything asbestos-adjacent: fibro-era sheds, and timber contaminated by damaged asbestos, carry disposal cost, not value.
• Second-hand appliances and kitchens — sell them yourself beforehand if they're good; they're worth nothing once the machines arrive.

Recycling that saves you money even when it doesn't pay you

Concrete and brick rubble goes to crushers and comes back as road base — tipped at a fraction of landfill rates. Clean timber, green waste and metals likewise divert cheaply. This is why a contractor who sorts on site (separate loads for concrete, metal, timber, general) demolishes cheaper than one who mixes everything into landfill loads — and why "all disposal included" quotes differ by thousands: they're not planning the same disposal.

How salvage credits should work in your quote

1. Agree it in writing before signing. Either the quote nets salvage off the price ("demolition $18,500 less $1,500 salvage credit"), or specific items are excluded for you to sell ("owner retains claw-foot bath, front door, 400 red bricks").
2. Beware "we'll see what we find". That means the value leaves on their truck.
3. Strip your keepsakes first. Anything sentimental or privately saleable comes out before the soft strip, on a written list.

Timing matters too

Salvage is a market: scrap metal prices move monthly, recycled timber yards fill and empty, and brick cleaners take batches when they have hands available. A contractor plugged into the local salvage network — who knows which yard wants baltic pine this month and which scrappie pays properly for copper — recovers meaningfully more than one who tips first and thinks later. Ask when the salvage will be sold and at whose price; "whenever, at whatever" is a discount you're funding.

Two worked tallies from our patch

1920s weatherboard, Echuca-style: 60 sqm of baltic pine flooring to a recycled timber yard ~$1,200; hardwood framing (partial recovery) ~$600; 2 claw-foot baths, doors and leadlight sold privately ~$900; scrap steel, copper and iron ~$700; 1,500 cleanable lime-mortar bricks ~$1,100. Roughly $4,500 against a $19,000 demolition — nearly a quarter of the job.

1985 brick veneer, anywhere: scrap metal run (steel roof, HWS, copper) ~$650; everything else crushed or recycled at reduced tip rates but no resale. Under $1,000 — worth having, not worth romanticising.

The honest position: salvage rarely makes demolition free, whatever the TV shows imply, but on pre-war homes it reliably offsets 10–30% of the cost — and it's your money, not the contractor's, if the quote says so. Either way, you should know before you sign — our quotes itemise it. Get a salvage-honest quote.