Can a house be recycled, just like we recycle our bottles and cans?  In a little house in  Shepherdstown’s East End, a young couple is doing just that. Danny and Michelle Carter have turned what Michelle calls “a big shack” into a work of love and respect for the Earth.

Danny fell in love with Shepherdstown as a student at Shepherd University. On one of their first dates, Danny and Michelle walked around town as Danny pointed out the places he loved.

After they were married, Danny, an art teacher at Country Day School, and Michelle, a biologist for the C&O National Historic Park, looked for a house in Shepherdstown, but were priced out of the market. In spring 2005 the owner of the East End property, Karen Valentine, was exhausted by her battles with the town regarding her proposed renovation. She was ready to throw in the towel, but wanted the house to go to someone who would appreciate the house’s quirkiness. She approached Danny. Michelle recalls the first time she saw the house. The first floor had a dirt floor and the roof was only framed.  “I would have confidently bet millions of dollars that we’d never live here!” But Danny was persistent. He saw the potential. And it was the only option they had to live in town on their budget. They bought the house in June 2005, and worked with local builder Pat Shunney to make it their own.

“Pat was terrific to work with because he let us do as much of the work as we could handle ourselves,” says Danny. What skills the couple didn’t have, they learned. Danny’s uncle, a retired drywall installer, gave them a crash course in installation and finishing. Friends helped too. Danny points to the bedroom ceiling painted by one friend and tilework done by another.

“We got to know the stockers at Lowe’s really well. We’d bring them donuts at 6:30 every Saturday morning, and rummage through the clearance items. Sometimes I’d stand there as a stocker would mark down a light fixture from $40 to two dollars. And then I’d grab it,” Danny said.

The bathroom tile was found in a friend’s mother’s flooded basement. The woman’s husband had bought the stock of a tile store that was going out of business, put it in their basement, and then forgot about it. The basement regularly flooded. Not to be deterred, Danny put his boots on and waded through a foot of standing water to find the perfect shower tile.

Rather than buy expensive molding, they stripped two-by-fours left over from construction, then stained and installed them around windows and doorways. Original logs removed for the renovation have gained new life as posts for the woodshed. Appliances were bought from friends who were upgrading or from scratch-and-dent clearance sales. A used futon became a swing on the back porch.

Even the house was recycled. Many of the original logs were rotten and unusable. They made fine firewood, and were burned in the kitchen woodstove the couple’s first winter in the house. “That’s what we call ‘burning down the house,’” Danny laughed.

The recycling wasn’t dictated only by the budget. “That’s the way I was raised,” said Michelle, who grew up in Kansas. “Why buy something new when something used still has life in it?” They’re proud of their “dumpster diving,” and excitedly point to the many finds—a desk turned into a sink base, an old shelf refinished and transformed into a bookcase, a friend’s couch with a rip in the back that no one ever sees.

And when Shepherd University replaced the Astroturf on the football field, Danny nabbed some of the old turf from the dumpster, and put it on the floor of the storage tent.

You might think such a mish-mash of materials and scratch-and-dent finds would be shabby. But Danny and Michelle’s home is as chic and cozy as any you might see in a magazine. And it’s twice as clever. Who says recycling is only for cans and bottles?