Demolition is fun
Life of a construction Project Series
Breaking stuff is for some reason really fun, and oddly satisfying. Ever since I was a kid (and like most kids I think), I’ve loved to smash things. Whether it was building something out of legos and throwing it down the stairs, trundling boulders down mountainsides and seeing them smash into stuff on the way down, or throwing rocks threw thin ice on a pond, there’s something about breaking stuff that just feels good.
As a grownup, and a general contractor I have more options for this, and thankfully they are even responsible. Unlike when you break something unintentionally, with the realization that you’re going to need to fix or replace it, when you demo a house, or kick a hole in a wall to remove drywall, or topple a pile of bricks, or smash a window that’s getting replaced you can just enjoy the sound of stuff getting broken, without the guilt.
Demo also usually signifies the beginning of a project; it’s like the breaking ground ceremony or the starting gun for a race. All the planning, negotiations, back and forth waiting for permits, waiting for money, etc. You don’t really know if a project is going to happen until you start ripping stuff apart, then there’s no going back. It’s exciting and nerve-racking. You don’t know what you’re going to find, you hope you anticipated everything correctly, and most of all, you hope everything goes as planned. There’s a lot of potential for bad things to happen during the demo phase, from damaging stuff that you didn’t want to people getting hurt. Breaking stuff is fun, but it’s dangerous too.
Demo for this project started on schedule, a good start for the project. I’m using a crew that I’ve used a couple of times now in SF that does demo exclusively. While demo doesn’t necessarily require a lot of skill, it helps when you have guys that have the tools and the experience to do it well. Safety is super important, as well as maintaining the job site and the common areas as much as possible during the process. In this case we’re in a multifamily building, with neighbors below and around us. We’ve got shared water and electrical connections, as well as shared walls. We’ve also got to haul all of the debris down three long flights of common area stairs. It’s really important that we don’t piss off the neighbors at this point, because if we do it’s just going to make everyone’s life more difficult for the rest of the project. So while demo isn’t rocket science, one guy on the crew that puts his foot threw the neighbors wall by accident, or cuts the wrong water line and floods the unit below can really mess things up.
Communicating about the exact scope of demo can be challenging too. Sometimes it’s easy, like if you’re gutting a house for example that’s pretty straightforward. In this case we’re doing much more surgical demo; we really only want to take out exactly what we need to so we don’t create more work for ourselves. Things like cutting straight lines in drywall to make patching easier, removing exactly the right amount of flooring so the new work matches up correctly can save a lot of time and money down the road. On the other hand, if you’re too conservative and don’t demo enough it makes the subs lives difficult when they come in to do their work, and it can end up costing you money and aggravation. Finding the right balance is key.
I like to be on site when the guys are demoing on a project like this. Every little thing I catch or can fine-tune is going to make things run smoother for the next guys that come in and so it feels like time well spent. The guys wanted to park their truck below the balcony of the unit we’re working on and toss the debris down instead of carrying it down the stairs. I acknowledged it would be easier that way, but with all the pedestrian traffic in the area it seemed like a terrible idea that I had to veto. I also caught them before they were able to tear up the entire gypcrete floor under the floor tile in the bathroom. They didn’t realize we were only removing the tile and so they started jackhammering out 4" of concrete, directly above the downstairs neighbors' bedroom.
All in all things went great. They were in and out in 2 and a half days, probably would have been two but their 4th man didn’t show after the first day which set them back a bit. No parking tickets and no one snuck into the building while they were ferrying out the debris. The common areas survived without any damage, I estimate there were over a hundred trips up and down the stairs to get all the trash out. After all that there was only one complaint from a neighbor, and it was actually about the carpet protection we put down. Sometimes you can’t win…
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