When Ed and Adrienne Hanley look around their Sedona home, they see a little bit of the past.

Actually, about 54 tons of it.

Nearly 85 percent of the Hanley's' 8-year-old home is recycled.

Not shredded-tire, crushed-aluminum-can recycled. Not save-the-planet recycled. A different style that involves a simple love of reusing something old, something you can't buy new anymore.

The Hanley home is built around seasoned wood, old growth Douglas fir harvested from northern California in the 1880s.

More than 100 years before this wood ended up in Sedona, the logs were air-dried and shipped to Utah, where they were used as pilings and milled into 30-foot-long, 8- by 16-inch timbers.

 

It was all part of a 12-mile-long railroad trestle called the Lucin Cutoff, built over a portion of the Great Salt Lake in 1902. The new bridge shaved time and miles off the original Promontory route, where the Golden Spike was driven when East met West to complete the transcontinental railroad in 1869.

By 1994, the Lucin trestle was out of service and starting to fall apart. Its wood was being salvaged and sold. Ed Hanley heard about the salvage and ended up buying several truckloads to build a home along Oak Creek.

His goal: construct a new house that would look 300 years old when finished.

"We sort of hit on the idea of building a home that would be a combination of a French, Spanish, Italian, Mexican farmhouse," he said.

Workers were told to use levels and other precise measurements only for portions that would affect structural integrity.

"Just eyeball it," Ed said. "I want the house to look like it was built by a farmer for his family after he had worked in the field all day."

That included interior stucco purposely not finished to modern standards.

Ed admitted he drove the stucco workers crazy with his instructions: "Don't smooth it down, don't spray it too much. Let it dry, let it crack. We want the cracks."

The result is a house with a distinctive feel. Exposed wood beams dominate the structure. Many timbers still have pieces of metal embedded in them, remnants of their previous life as a trestle.

"The bridge is part of this picture, but the wood has a totally new life here, and I think whatever that life here is, it seems to be very comfortable," Ed said. "None of it's tried to leave," he added with a laugh.

In addition to huge Douglas fir timbers, the trestle also included smaller redwood planking. The Hanley's also purchased some of that, using it to build an expansive radial deck offering gorgeous views of Cathedral Rock. Ed turned more of it into 17 handmade door.

Each has a different top. Some have glass, some have fabric. One uses saguaro ribs; another is covered in pennies. It was all part of Ed's philosophy.

"When you approach a door, it should give you an introduction to what the room is you're going to enter," he said.

The redwood also turns up as flooring in the kitchen, one of the most comfortable spaces in the home.

It's a large space with two striking elements: a table Ed made from a large piece of redwood burl, and a fireplace at waist height. The table works for eat-in dining, a place for visitors to chat with the cook, or even as extra work space. The fireplace creates a homey feeling, and throws plenty of heat on autumn and winter days.

The Hanley's didn't actually use their kitchen fireplace until a power outage last winter sent them scrambling for extra heat. They've since come to love it . . . although sometimes it pops an ember or two onto that recycled redwood.

"We've increased the old look in the floor by having some genuine burn marks," Adrienne said.

She's an attorney in Sedona. He's a retired Air Force and commercial pilot. But since the house project started eight years ago, overseeing the work has become Ed's job - and even turned into a side business.

Numerous people who saw the house said they would love to get their hands on similar old wood. So Ed started a business as a recycled-wood broker, finding salvaged wood from old buildings and getting it to builders and architects.

But nothing tops the experience the Hanley's had creating their own home from these pieces of history.

"The timing, the opportunity that presented itself with the wood, and the people that were gathered at that time to do the construction were absolutely perfect," Ed said. "Nobody could have planned it any better than the way it worked."

Reach the reporter at (602) 444-8745.