Finally!  Progress.  Demolition begins.  Has gone incredibly fast and the place is pretty much down to the brick skeleton of a building. 

I haven’t been there much during the day but it seems like no more than 5 guys have done the job of tearing out everything in the place in two weeks.

The demolition has happened in 2 weeks and today the building is pretty completely cleaned out.

Our demolition contractor saved a lot of stuff like bricks, doors, windows, flooring, underlayment, kitchen cabinets, and usable wood.  Saving stuff for reuse is partly an alien concept to demo crews but they did it and it’ll go back in the finished home.

Before demolition started, we took out about 2000sf of hardwood floor.  The original flooring will be reinstalled on the 2nd level.  Here you see the structure which was under much of that floor being removed to make way for the cement slab which will be our studio floor.  That slab will have radiant heating in it. the joists which you see in the second picture below will be reprocessed into our new stairs throughout the interior of the house.

After the physical roofing membrane (many years and layers worth) was removed, the deck and the structure of the old roof came off... and then...

Before and after the roof came off, there was masonry.  Before, to remove a window well, move some window locations, get ready for the removal of the old trusses and the placement of new ones.  After, to rebuild firewalls, build a brick wall next to our neighbor’s building which will eliminate the need to place exterior finish in the two inch space between the buildings and to finish around the trusses.

...there was nothing!

But debris!  We were hoping that we would recycle 90%.  We just got our report back and we did exactly 75% recycle rate on our building waste.  Not so bad!  That’s many tons of waste kept out of the ground and made into products like the OSB which we are using on our project.

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