LEXINGTON, Mass. (AP) – It’s over budget, Paul Pedini says of his Big Dig house, but at least “it doesn’t leak.”

Besides the chic factor, Pedini wants the home to be a prototype for recycling. It was built using steel and concrete salvaged from his years of working on the $14.6 billion highway construction project.

“These materials are as good as you can get,” said Pedini, a 51-year-old civil engineer who spent a decade working on the construction of the maze of bridges and tunnels that make up 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, recycle them. When it’s time to dismantle temporary highways, for example, their beams and concrete slabs would be sent to the construction site of its second use: a public housing project, municipal parking garage, prison, even as a replacement bridge.

“They key comes in identifying the second use up front,” he said, so that the materials can be engineered for two uses. “We’d take the materials from cradle to grave.” It’s easier than people think, he says. It took just three days to erect the frame of the “Big Dig house,” a 4,300-square foot contemporary home, which cost $645,000 to build, that overlooks a neighborhood of modern homes atop a hill in Lexington, a tony suburb about 12 miles west of Boston.

Pedini worked 11 years on the Big Dig, better known for its failures – water leaks, cost overruns and, more recently, a fatal accident after 12 tons of ceiling panels fell, killing 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 Co., one of the project’s main contractors, and his role was to oversee construction of two tunnel sections – neither of which has leaked, he said – and several bridges.

To keep motorists moving in and out of the city during the oft-delayed project, temporary ramps had to be built using hundreds of 100-foot-long prefabricated concrete slabs.

Architect John Hong, who Pedini hired in 2003 to design his home, was skeptical until he saw the dismantled highway pieces and thought, “It’s actually very efficient.”

The home, whose posts once held up the loop ramps at the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, was designed by Hong and partner Jinhee Park, founders of Single Speed Design in Cambridge.

As the highways were dismantled, Modern Continental began stacking the pieces in storage yards, and when there was no space left Big Dig officials asked the company to trash the handful of slabs that remained, he said.

“These were the smallest ones, and they were oddly shaped,” Pedini said of the 13 concrete slabs, each about 40 feet long and weighing up to 25 tons, that comprise his floors and roof.

“People get resentful. They say, Well, how come you got the materials?’ Well, to be truthful they belonged to the company. They were trash, they were junk. It took a lot of effort and money to get them to this site,” said Pedini, who paid a crew $10,000 to transport the slabs on trailers.

He got the materials for free, estimating the giveaway saved Modern $20,000 in demolition and dumping fees.

The home overlooks Six Moon Hill, founded in the late 1940s by German architect Walter Gropius and his Architects Collaborative.

The Big Dig house, built on land that Pedini bought for $410,000, consists of two main living spaces. Up a few steps from the front door and you’re in a 1,000-square foot combined kitchen and dining room, where finished floor panels are heated in the winter. Besides the 600,000 pounds of steel and concrete, the rest of the home has new materials.

A finished basement that doubles as a workout space sits below the kitchen and dining room, and the master bedroom is above it on the top floor – accessible by a cable-stayed staircase in a nod to the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge.

Looking up in the 800-square-foot great room, featuring a 27-foot ceiling and floor-to-ceiling windows in one corner, Pedini points to three highway slabs that are the underside of his roof. Numbers scrawled on the concrete indicate where the slabs once sat as part of a temporary highway. This section of the home was built second, on the spot where a crane was parked to lift and drop the concrete slabs in place on the first section.

Pedini’s wife, Cristina Perez-Pedini, also a civil engineer, designed the system that captures rain water for re-use on the garden atop the two-car garage. The couple now is building a roof deck. They moved in six months ago, after about 18 months of construction.

Pedini, Hong and Park hope the home is only a beginning. Under an idea Pedini calls “engineered precycling,” they want a percentage of government-funded transportation construction contracts to require precycling.

But it may not fly in tradition-laced Massachusetts, where such projects have been hard sells.

Pedini had hoped to use Big Dig scraps to build a 24-unit apartment building on Modern Continental-owned property in North Cambridge. But residents and civic groups objected to the design.

“They think concrete or steel is not for a domestic building,” Park said. “It’s hard for them to imagine.”

The City of Newton also said no thanks to a boathouse along the Charles River that Pedini proposed building with Big Dig leftovers.

Is Massachusetts ready for precycling? Hong noted the subdued local reaction to a recently aired PBS series on sustainable construction that featured the Big Dig house.

“All of our e-mails – all of them – have been coming from California,” he said. “Not a single peep from Massachusetts.”

The team hopes the state of Washington will show more interest. Officials are in the planning stages of a multibillion-dollar highway project in Seattle, replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

Pedini calls the project “ideal” and has informally discussed it with the Washington Department of Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald, who worked for a Massachusetts water and sewer agency in the 1990s.

It may require some legwork, however. Washington Project Director Ron Paananen sounded less optimistic, noting that most contracts give construction firms ownership of the materials. He also said it’s unlikely they’ll build many temporary highways. But he added: “I would never say never.”

Meanwhile, Pedini now vice president for another major construction firm, Jay Cashman Inc., has spun off an affiliate company, ICON, to pursue his “precycling” goals. In addition to Seattle, Pedini hopes to sell the idea to federal transportation officials.

“Our goal is to get federal funding for a program like that, prove that it can be done, and then once we do it, try to standardize it so it becomes a rote portion for every megaproject thereafter,” he said.

And they aren’t done with the Big Dig, either. Hong and Park have drawn up plans for a Cashman headquarters. It would be a 30,000-square foot building using Big Dig beams and highway slabs, which they’d have to buy and transport from the storage yard.

“We’re looking for an over-the-top effect,” Pedini adds.