The Wall Street Journal | Real Estate December 21, 2012

Scott and Pamela Weiss paid a little under $5 million for a home in Palo Alto, Calif., last year. Come tax time, they expect to get back about $66,000 for tearing it down.

That's because the Weisses, who are spending more than $4 million to build a new home on the site, took down the original home using a method known as "deconstruction." In this process, a crew carefully dismantles an older property by hand instead of using bulldozers. The process costs more than a straightforward demolition—the Weisses paid more than $20,000 for the disassembly, roughly double what they would have paid for a wrecking crew. But they were able to donate home materials such as lumber, roof tiles and even lamps to nonprofits for reuse.

Link to the complete article on the Wall Street Journal: The Demolition Discount