Taking the old and making it new again
8/6/2025
What do most people do with old wood? Toss it into the wood chipper? Take it to the dump? Burn it? Or leave it in a pile for someone else to deal with? When Ryan François encounters scrap wood, particularly old-growth wood, he sees an opportunity.
François grew up on the north side of the Beaverdale neighborhood in Des Moines. After graduating with a degree in engineering from Iowa State and doing some traveling, he returned to Des Moines to start bringing some of the city’s older homes back to life.
“I started getting interested in rehabbing old homes like the one we grew up in, like a mid-century house. It inspired me to move back to town and start looking at rehabbing old homes near downtown that were in disrepair,” François said.
That led him to start Rally Cap Properties, taking his hobby that had him once rehab a home while he was in college.
“A lot of the properties that I’ve bought have been vacant for years before we buy them. And some of them are foreclosures or auctions. Some of them are directly from the owners. They hear about us and know that we do quality work and choose to sell to us,” François said.
Since getting started in 2015, François has helped rehab more than 30 homes. The homes he specializes in are from days gone by, with the houses typically being originally built between the 1890s and 1920s — homes in serious need of a facelift.
François appears to enjoy taking things from old, to new. The renovations are not the only way he does that. He enjoys collecting and salvaging old-growth wood from previous projects, or any other way he can get his hands on the sturdy material, and putting it into new projects.
“Once you kind of get into renovating old houses, you realize the quality of lumber that was available back then. It’s much better than the quality of lumber that you have now,” François said. “When America was getting developed and built out, a lot of the wood that we had was old-growth, meaning, virgin forests that had never been logged or cut down. So, some of those trees were 800 or however many hundreds of years old when they were cut. It’s just a much higher quality material.”
François saves framing lumber, lumber used in walls, and even items found on Facebook Marketplace. This allows him to use it creatively in another project, and, the material does not end up in a landfill.
“The environmental impact is a major consideration. I am generally trying to look for ways to reduce my impact. Resource management and reusing good materials that we already have immediately available is, to me, a much preferable outcome than importing new materials,” François said.
One project that benefited greatly from the reused wood was the Woodland Realm Urban Garden.
“That was cool because I’ve been saving all this stuff, like windows and doors and all the wood, with these types of projects in mind. It’s fun to have the material ahead of time and then be able to shape the building based on what you have, rather than have a really rigid building plan and needing to go out and buy a bunch of new materials to make it,” François said.
He has also seen many positive reactions to his work over the years. For François, he appreciates that people can appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into the projects.
“I think people recognize when something’s been hand-built using quality materials. It just feels nice, especially when it’s all wood and no plastic products or composite products. It’s just a good feeling. And I think it feels natural and cozy and warm. Buildings that are made out of natural wood just have a really good feel to them,” François said.
Saunas are next on the project list for François.
“I know they’re gaining a lot of popularity, so I’m saving materials up to build a backyard sauna for myself and my fiancé. Building custom saunas for people’s backyards could be a unique business opportunity and something that would be a lot of fun,” François said. ♦
