Our Team

We operate as a member-owned worker cooperative.  The two central characteristics of worker cooperatives are: (1) worker-members invest in and own the business together, and it distributes surplus to them and (2) decision-making is democratic, adhering to the general principle of one member-one vote.

Deconstruction Works is a Vermont-based team of deconstruction workers cooperating to create a vibrant reuse culture.  The senior members of our team are:

Erich Kruger has been in the building trades since 1997 when he was teaching carpentry in Antigua, West Indies as part of the Peace Corp/Crisis Corps.  In Vermont he has worked for several general contractors and on his own.  In 2005 he founded the non-profit ReNew Building Materials & Salvage, and has consulted with, and later ran, the deconstruction program at Finger Lakes ReUse in  Ithaca, New York .   He holds a degree in Wildlife Management & Environmental Ethics (minor).

Erich is happiest when he is diverting building materials at a job-site in the company of other like-minded conscientious deconstructors, or on the wood floors of a local contra dance with his family.  He lives in a straw bale home he built with ecological features, including solar electric, solar hot water, composting toilet, and masonry wood heater/oven. 

Tom Shea has been involved in environmental conservation and building trades his entire career.  Upon graduation in 1995 from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a degree in Natural Resource Law and Policy he worked for the better part of ten years with a variety of state, local, federal and non-profit organizations throughout the country designing and building recreation trail systems.

Tom started calling Vermont home in 2001 and currently lives with his twin daughters in Central Vermont.  Once in Vermont, he began working as an environmental consultant where he specialized in erosion and sediment control on large commercial construction sites.  He has completed many stream and watershed restoration projects throughout Vermont.

From 2010 – 2013 Tom served as an operations director for a Burlington based non-profit ReSOURCE, where he was responsible for the management and staff development for their deconstruction program.  While at ReSOURCE Tom fine tuned his management and deconstruction skills, for which he has always had passion.

Tom is a Master Deconstruction Skills Trainer with the BuildReuse.  He has  taught a deconstruction course at Yestermorrow.  Tom loves to safely and efficiently salvage building materials from houses that would otherwise be headed to the landfill and to then create functional items from these salvaged materials.

Dave Giese started out exploring homes while performing energy audits after graduating with a degree in Environmental and Resource Engineering from SUNY ESF in 1986. He continued in the non-profit sector at a food bank in Seattle and a weatherization program on Whidbey Island, WA.

After hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2000, he moved back east and started deconstructing houses while working for the ReStore in Springfield, MA.  

Dave started his own deconstruction company, Piece By Piece Deconstruction, in 2010 and joined the Deconstruction Works team full time in 2019.  Dave enjoys building furniture out of reused materials and he continues to try to hike and canoe as much as possible while still earmarking a few hours to pull some nails.

Hannah Bath grew up working in a small family-owned business in northeastern Pennsylvania and from there worked for small businesses in central Oregon, southern California, eastern Maine, and now southern Vermont.

Hannah has adventured all over the country climbing, hiking, and camping but has found a home in Vermont and a family in the Deconstruction Works crew. Hannah learned the trade on the job, found herself easily aligned with the philosophy of the company, and well suited to the physicality of the work.

Hannah is happiest on a roof, or relocating slumbering bats.