Deconstruction - salvaging entire buildings

Deconstruction is an alternative to demolition. It means carefully dismantling the constructed components of a house (or other building) so the materials can be salvaged and reused. Materials are typically removed in the opposite order in which they were installed, to maximize reuse.

A solarpunk society may have many reasons to disassemble a building. Generally reuse of existing structures (perhaps with retrofits for insulation, solar, etc) is much better than destruction but that's not always the case:

There’s tons of embodied carbon stored in those structures. In their carefully-refined materials, their transportation, and in the act of construction. Some of those materials might be very difficult to produce for a society that carefully watches its externalities and seeks to do as little harm as possible.

By carefully disassembling these structures and providing the recovered materials to their communities, solarpunk societies can build for a much lower overall cost (both environmentally and in resources harvested from the world) while removing potential toxin or fire threats. And by filling in the buildings' cellarholes and replanting, they can rewild once-developed land, build better habitats, and restore their local ecosystems.

The Process

How this looks will likely depend on where your setting is in the solarpunk transition. If it's a post-postapocalypse with scarce resources where people are focused on surviving the year and rebuilding better, it'll look a lot more ad-hoc and rushed than a post-scarcity utopia with resources to spare.

Ideally a solarpunk society is likely to place much more emphasis on including all stakeholders in a decision up front, rather than ramming a project through the way we often see in modern day civic planning. This adds a significant delay at the outset (AKA the cheap part of the process) but once a consensus is found, execution is usually unopposed and much faster.

The process of identifying buildings suitable for deconstruction, working with any owners/stewards still around, etc will be very circumstantial for your story.

There's a little more consistency in how the actual work of deconstruction will look. Most deconstruction sites will look much like a modern construction site in reverse. Different crews work on the building in stages: