At home with the Big Dig

LEXINGTON, Mass.

It’s over budget, Paul Pedini says of his Big Dig house, but at least “it doesn’t leak.”

Mr. Pedini wants the home — built using steel and concrete salvaged from Boston’s $14.6 billion highway construction project — to be a prototype for recycling.

“These materials are as good as you can get,” said Mr. Pedini, a 51-year-old civil engineer who spent a decade working on the Big Dig. “We were being paid money to junk this stuff. There’s something inherently illogical about it.”

So instead of dumping top-shelf materials, he wants to recycle them into a public-housing project, a municipal parking garage, a prison and even a replacement bridge.

The key, Mr. Pedini said, comes in identifying the second use, so the materials can be engineered for two uses.

It took just three days to erect the frame of the “Big Dig house,” a 4,300-square-foot home, which cost $645,000 to build. It overlooks a neighborhood of modern homes atop a hill in Lexington, a tony suburb about 12 miles west of Boston.

Mr. Pedini worked 11 years on the Big Dig, better known for its failures — water leaks, cost overruns and a recent collapse of ceiling panels that killed a passenger in a car — than its success in burying the hulking Central Artery beneath downtown Boston. At the time, he was a vice president for Modern Continental Construction Co., one of the project’s main contractors.

To keep motorists moving in and out of the city during the oft-delayed project, temporary ramps were built using hundreds of prefabricated concrete slabs.

Architect John Hong, whom Mr. Pedini hired in 2003 to design his home, was skeptical until he saw the dismantled highway pieces and thought, “It’s actually very efficient.”

The home was designed by Mr. Hong and partner Jinhee Park, founders of Single Speed Design in Cambridge. Concrete slabs, each about 40 feet long and weighing up to 25 tons, make up the floors and roof. Besides the 600,000 pounds of steel and concrete, the rest of the home has new materials.

Mr. Pedini got the materials free of charge and estimated that the giveaway saved Modern Continental $20,000 in demolition and dumping fees.

“People get resentful. They say, ‘Well, how come you got the materials?’” said Mr. Pedini, who paid a crew $10,000 to transport the slabs on trailers. “Well, to be truthful, they belonged to the company. They were trash, they were junk.”

The house, built on land that Mr. Pedini bought for $410,000, consists of two main living spaces. Up a few steps from the front door is a 1,000-square-foot combined kitchen and dining room. A finished basement that doubles as a workout space sits below, and the master bedroom is above it on the top floor.

Looking up in the 800-square-foot great room, featuring a 27-foot ceiling and floor-to-ceiling windows in one corner, Mr. Pedini points to three highway slabs that are the underside of his roof. Numbers scrawled on the concrete indicate where the slabs once sat as part of a temporary highway.

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