I’m currently a co-owner of a small renovations contractor in a small city (~50k) in northern Wisconsin. My equipment consists of a 7×14′ trailer full of tools, large diesel truck, and minivan. All of these pieces of equipment are near catastrophic failure, but see at least weekly use. We do not have a location for office, shop, or indoor parking of any of our equipment.
For all my previous careers, I’ve been able to operate without vehicles or large equipment which has satisfied my personal environmental goals, but it seems extremely unlikely that I’ll be able to do any sort of single/double family residential construction without gas powered vehicles, and especially because most customers would scoff at seeing a contractor show up on a bicycle.
Despite this, I’m wondering what different aspects of this I should really be looking at in regards to sustainability. Is driving my old leaky minivan and finding locally sourced and milled lumber more important than riding my bike to site and having box store lumber delivered all the way from Oregon? What’s the impact of owning and moving around a wide variety of tools? Could this even be economically competitive with all the other specialized contractors who are willing to drive from a county away to do short, specific tasks?
I conceivably have access to build any type of trailer for bicycles. I’m fabricating a trailer for a local bike delivery service that can hold 1000 pound pallets, this person could also deliver some types of lumber for me. We can assume that my budget is high, operating costs are low, but time is short. I’m interested in any types of stories, success or failure, of people running handyman/carpenter/trade businesses to be more sustainable.
