Demolition

Demo isn't just demo anymore.

Some phases of demo at Revell

First off, a big shout-out to the Springfield ReStore, CET's EcoBuilding Bargains, and John Grossman. The biggest form of recycling is reusing a building, but even remodeling often involves removing materials that are still useful to others. ReStore is helping everyone reduce and reuse piece by piece, while also supplying great deals to a lot of folks. We are trying to get as much material donated to them as possible, and we're also reusing some of the material ourselves when we can. But if we were to do this again, we would likely insist on using their "deconstruction" services in lieu of hiring a demolition contractor with vague promises of donating whatever they can salvage along the way.

Meanwhile, we have seen a lot of shades of demo already on this project. First, we did a bit of recon on our own, cutting down a piece of sheetrock in the attic to see why there was so much material falling from the beams, and digging a little hole to see as far as we could down the outside of the foundation.

Then we hired a spunky handyman to do some exploratory demo. He got rid of most of the random construction that had been added on by tenants over the years, and stripped the attic and basement down to the structure so we could get engineers in to diagnose. We couldn't have even started wrapping our brains around this project without his brave work in cleaning the place out for us.

Now that we're in our official contract with Wright Builders, our first step is, again, demo. Surprisingly, the budget line for this work was one of the largest in the overall project! Is there going to be anything left of this poor old house? Even from this one photo, though, you can start to see how much work is involved in this full demo phase.