Look, I didn’t believe it either when I first heard it. But you saw the title – we really seriously demolished a house that was hidden INSIDE another house. Every time you think you’ve seen it all, residential demolition keeps you guessing.
Why Is There Another House Inside?
The story is a rather strange one. The owner of the double-house is a professional home designer, and he took on one last project before retirement – building his dream home. He found the perfect location, in a wonderful neighborhood, even though it already had a house on the lot. But hey, that’s fine. He’d just get a demo contractor like us to clear it off and then he could rebuild. Easy! Right? No.
For reasons unclear to me, and likely to him, it was very difficult to obtain a demolition permit. He came to realize that he was never going to be able to just wipe this Redington Beach slate clean. So he came up with a great, if unusual work-around: he would re-use some of the existing structure. That way the new home could classify as a renovation, not a rebuild. An update, not a do-over.
Demolition Begins
The plan was very simple: we would shred the inside of the house with a skid steer, and then disassemble the structural elements by hand. We cut a hole in the back of the house to let in the skid steer, which set to work peeling off all of the decorative and non-structural elements. Kitchen fixtures, tile, drywall, and basic framing were all scrapped at lightning speed and pushed out the back door.
Manual Demolition
We could safely demolish all of the drywall, carpet, and such with big machines, but the structure itself had to be handled a little more carefully. While the first crew was scraping out the inside, our second demolition crew got to work on the roof of the inner house. They took hand tools up top, and started stripping the roofing. Once the interior was cleared, they took saws up and cut loose each of the beams. No heavy machines could reach this roof. It had to be taken down by hand. And so it was.
Cleanup
During the residential demolition, as each part of the house was disassembled by hand, its component parts were collected in a pile in the center of the old house. Very quickly, it stopped looking like a house and started looking like a collection of concrete blocks. Workers carried wood and metal and scrap out to a revolving series of roll-off dumpsters; many were sent back to our recycling yard, a few went to the landfill.
In the end, this was the result:
The outer house remained, with structural elements of the old, inner, house still remaining wherever they could be reused. From here, the new house could be built, using part of the frame of the old. It was a very strange residential demolition project, but we handled it just fine.
If you want us to handle YOUR next demolition project, just reach out to us at any time. We can’t wait to hear from you, and we look forward to working with you. We demolish everything from sheds to hotels, from pools to restaurants.