Six weeks, three 18 yard dumpster loads and 145 “man” hours later, we have completed the demolition of the non-permitted, mold and rodent excrement filled cabin addition. All that is left is the flooring and the lower level deck. This accomplishment is cause for celebration!
What I learned from the demolition:
- Wear protective clothing, goggles, and a respirator. You can never be too careful as my son-in-law found out when he opted for hiking boots instead of professional work boots and took a nail through the bottom of his foot.
- Make sure you’ve had a tetanus shot in the past seven years.
- Try to place the dumpster as close to your work site as possible. Due to all the large beautiful moss-covered rocks and the slope of my property, we were unable to have it close to the addition. This less than ideal placement required lots of walking, carrying and pushing a wheelbarrow of debris to the dumpster about 50 feet away from the work site.
- When working remotely as we were, it was important to bring the necessary tools each day to the work site. We often needed nails we didn’t have, so I often removed nails from the demo debris to reuse. One day I forgot to bring the circular saw so we ended up cutting some ceiling joists with a hand saw made to cut tree branches. We could have left our tools in the cabin but felt that it just wasn’t secure enough.