Knocking a house down

[peds]

On 01/03/2022 at 19:45, Macpherson said:

You might be lucky and find some nice stone which you may be able to reuse as features in the house you build.. Lintels, quoins, cills etc.

 

I don't know what your local stone is like, but over here the older houses had first pick of what was lying around when they were built all that time ago, and often a lot of it is very reusable.

 

Obviously I've  no idea of your plans but you may get enough good stuff for a feature fireplace, porch or something, letting the old house live one.

 

I too will watch with interest, cheers.

All of the cills are a good block of stone, 6 of them, plus a doorstep. The lime plaster I've scraped off the walls so far shows a range of sizes underneath, there's some beautiful big bits. Our digger driver says we'll need to look out for any good bits around the hearth and chimney, too. 

It's all our local limestone, probably taken from the now defunct quarry just down the road, same geology as the cliffs up behind the house.

 

The new extension (left of photo) is of concrete block construction, I'll even be tapping the mortar off of them and stacking them away for future use.

[peds]

8 hours ago, skc101fc said:

Living out hereSW Ireland, We've got 2 of these old wrecks on our land. Soil infill and rubble between the stones, only the render (plaster) on the outer and inner walls holds them together. No or poor jointing of corners. As we found out when we hacked off the mortar on the gable end , the wall "sprang" out leaving a 70 mm gap where the ceiling should have been touching the wall inside.
No foundations to be of any trustworthy purpose, so start digging against the walls and the rest of the cottage will be joining you in the hole !

Sounds exactly like what we've got up here in Sligo. It's a beautiful old building until you start looking closely at it.

[peds]

7 hours ago, sime42 said:

Take the roof off and rain will rapidly do the rest by the sound of it...

There's a few holes in the tin roof, and the bits beneath are visibly falling apart quicker than the rest.

 

We bought the place 2 years ago, we emptied the seven-years-dead previous owners' lives into a skip (keeping and recycling whatever we could... the wardrobe is now a henhouse, the fridge is going to be an egg incubator/honey warming cabinet, the coconut matting from the mattress is lining my hanging baskets.. ), and it's crazy to see just how quickly the property continues to rot. It wouldn't be long before nature does the job for us.

[peds]

3 hours ago, NJA said:

Ref demolition;

Large machine+ large skip =fast but expensive 

Dismantle by hand and separate materials = slow but v cheap (my preferred option if it was me)

We'll be walking down the middle of those 2 options, definitely. All the unwanted metal will definitely be sold for scrap, it'll barely cover the cost of driving to the scrapyard but there you go. I'm going to be saving what I can of the plumbing and electrics, the watertank and fuse box can definitely be reused, but I'm not going to be too precious about it... most of the wiring and pipes can definitely go into the (medium sized) skip.

 

The current toilet is going to be installed as a (private) composting toilet my shed, the bathtub is going to be sunken into the wooden deck with a lid to hide under, next to the sauna and hot tub, as a plunge pool. Guess what the hot tub is going to be made of...?

[peds]

19 minutes ago, carlos said:

id use a angle grinder with a thin disc to take the nail heads off, when removing the tin rather than trying to pull the nails out.

it might be an idea to let the digger take down the roof timbers if you are going to burn them, a lot easier and safer than ladders and chainsaw.

You are in Ireland, right?

 

Where do we stand legally with burning the wood that can't be salvaged? I'm not into throwing every bit of shite on the burn pile, even though we are hundreds of meters from the nearest neighbours, but I've nothing against getting rid of dry wood like that.

 

Chatting to my boss earlier, he suggested digging a hole, burying the whole lot, and selling the spare topsoil... I'm not into that, either.

 

 

[carlos]

i think legally your not meant to burn stuff, i guess if you have an arsey neighbour then it could be a problem, ive burnt loads of stuff if it has a lot of nails in it.

 

[sime42]

There's a few holes in the tin roof, and the bits beneath are visibly falling apart quicker than the rest.
 
We bought the place 2 years ago, we emptied the seven-years-dead previous owners' lives into a skip (keeping and recycling whatever we could... the wardrobe is now a henhouse, the fridge is going to be an egg incubator/honey warming cabinet, the coconut matting from the mattress is lining my hanging baskets.. ), and it's crazy to see just how quickly the property continues to rot. It wouldn't be long before nature does the job for us.

Yep, houses deteriorate rapidly when there's no one living there to do even simple maintenance. Water is always the biggest destroyer I think. Quite nice to see in a way through; how quickly mother nature erases the marks of man.

Good efforts with the reusing/recycling/upcycling of previous contents. Sure you can do the same with the bulk of the building materials. Pretty much all building stone can be reused, if you've got masonry patience, or hardcore if not!

[peds]

7 minutes ago, carlos said:

i think legally your not meant to burn stuff, i guess if you have an arsey neighbour then it could be a problem, ive burnt loads of stuff if it has a lot of nails in it.

 

I guess I'll just arrange a few garden chairs around it and call it a fire pit, keep a bag of marshmallows handy in case anyone gets suspicious. 

[Macpherson]

2 minutes ago, peds said:

All of the cills are a good block of stone, 6 of them, plus a doorstep. The lime plaster I've scraped off the walls so far shows a range of sizes underneath, there's some beautiful big bits. Our digger driver says we'll need to look out for any good bits around the hearth and chimney, too. 

It's all our local limestone, probably taken from the now defunct quarry just down the road, same geology as the cliffs up behind the house.

 

The new extension (left of photo) is of concrete block construction, I'll even be tapping the mortar off of them and stacking them away for future use.

 

 

I thought as much, Limestone's easy to work with and stonework very satisfying and rewarding and if I were you I'd think twice about burying anything but the total dross.

 

Our predecessors laboured long and hard to shelter themselves from the weather with a few primitive tools and knew a bit about craftmanship, if the whole original house is Limestone then any stone even if rough can be reworked relatively easily and rebuilt into something else, I wonder how much you'd pay today to buy a house load of quarried local building stone.

 

The fact that it will fall down easily gives you potentially  the main part of another building or a resource to build whatever the stone says to you.. but beware, . working with stone is more addictive than milling😁 and Limestone is one of the easiest to use[ imo ]

 

Probably a pressure washer will clean the old lime mortar off the stone and as you demolish it separate / sort the stone into separate piles depending on potential reuse, big flatties/right angles/graded by size/1 off shapes etc.so it's not all in a jumbled pile, double handling and the back pain.

 

As for your road, I don't think it would be to expensive just to get other loads of ballast delivered.

 

All the best with your plans👍

[LGP Eddie]

Done loads of knock downs, full houses and parts of them for larger extensions to go back onto.

 

Quite simply you don’t just knock them down you deconstruct them and an excavator with selector grab and a decent operator is in reality the cheapest thing on the job.

 

Put your efforts into the sorting of materials, salvaging scrap, copper, wiring etc, and when it comes to timber if it isn’t rotten and you can de nail it ok, then save it.

It’s absolutely incredible how valuable bits of timber are on builds, from just making some profiles to dig the footings, to propping, shuttering, fencing etc etc.

 

I don’t know the regs over there, but here you at least need one skip through the system as some waste is always expected and that’s often a lot of insulation and plasterboard that’s a complete nightmare.

 

It all depends on what’s going back as to the prep before, but getting any services back to the boundary, establishing site supplies for electric and water, and ensuring any manhole or remaining foul or storm water drain connections are well marked and protected.

This is vital if the original footings and original manholes have to be grubbed out too, as you can get amongst it unhindered.

 

You have a readily available tip for the hardcore, it used to be a balance as to send the material away and buy back in or crush on site.

Always make certain the hardcore pile is absolutely spotless, if it’s going off site and the companies can see it’ll go straight through the crusher, then good terms can be negotiated, with return loads of their crushed if space available and the material of good enough quality.

 

I’ve done it every which way from literally loading the hardcore of full houses straight into 8 wheelers, to putting full houses through a crusher bucket on a 6 tonner because access was horrendous.

Had a play with many different options over the years, and all have their place.

 

 

Eddie.