At home with the Big Dig

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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."