MN4x4
Well-known member
I want one!
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I spent the better part of a year tearing down a house on our property we gutted it and stripped all the siding what a pain in the a** .
I had an friend with a excavator come over and smash it up filled 3 30 yard dumpsters and hauled out one load of cement
<a href="http://s1160.photobucket.com/user/114rogers/media/imagejpg1.jpg.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1160.photobucket.com/albums/q484/114rogers/imagejpg1.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo imagejpg1.jpg"/></a>
Sorry for the tilted pic
Platonic,Congrats on the acquisition! If you didn’t already have a full time job, I’d agree with the do-it-yourself demo decision. Let’s face it, demo rules! Metal recycling and selling miscellaneous internals is a no-brainer.
I’m having a hard time reconciling “A” with “B”:
“A”
- You purchase the property outright with cash.
- You planned on renting it out for a few years, but found that it was unsuitable to rent out. This tells me that a thorough inspection was unnecessary since renting it was not a financially critical part of the plan.
- You’re a financially stable full-time office employee, have a good retirement plan and take yearly family vacations.
“B”
- Primary motivation for your do-it-yourself choice is cost. At the end of the day you might save $3,000.
So the choice is between the following options:
- Spend 20 full 12 hour days getting this project done. Weekdays, you’re Clark Kent. Weekends you transform into Superman. You go on your well-deserved annual family vacation.
- Spend 10 full 12 hour days getting this project half done. You unearth a protected stash of Krytonite and say f* this and hire a company to finish the job. End result savings are $0 cause it’s now the middle of summer and that annoying contractor “supply and demand” thing comes into play. You can't afford the annual family vacation, but desperately need one.
- Skip the family vacation this year to pay the extra $ for a company to take care of the grunt work and be done with it in short order. Clark Kent’s secret identity and sanity remain intact.
Looks to me like you’ve selected option #2.
Thanks for the support Olinrj. I may need all I can get before this is over.Subscribed!
Kudos to you for taking this on. I am of the same mindset as you. This summer my wife and I, with the help of friends and family remodeled our basement and replaced the interior drain tile. It was a 5 month project but we got it done for less than half of the estimates to just repair the drain tile.
With the amount of potentially salvageable lumber, I definitely would get the denailer.
Best of luck and I look forward to progress updates.
Bob
He said he would use something called silent demolition, maybe someone here is familiar with it. He said he would drill a bunch of holes in the mortar and put something in it that cracks the mortar, maybe a very low level explosive? Anyway he said the walls would just fall apart.
Mac and Cat,
Thanks for the support.
All,
I promise, I will try to work on some pictures.


I don't think you really can "fail". We exchange money for knowledge all the time. This was a very wise purchase, looking at the size of your house on that cramped lot compared to what will be an appropriately sized stately lot. I have little doubt that the resulting value of the combined properties will equal or exceed what you paid.In the end, this will be a grand experiment. Either documenting my failure, so others don't make the same mistake, or my success, with tips to help others to take the same approach.
I plan on doing at least a partial deconstruction, the interior as mentioned. Shingles and siding will be removed. A few of the doors are very nice and I am going to try to sell them. Some of the interior demo will be done this winter.
I don't believe the city has any ordinances concerning fill. The guy that have me the $8000 quote to demo was planning to collapse the basement walls and then fill.
There are 2 doors downstairs that are supposed to have come out of an estate in St. Louis when the house was remodeled back in the 50's. Those are already sold along with most of the other interior doors. We are going to try to utilize a couple of the exterior doors in our house. Our front door is a modern replacement and we would like to have an old one. The front door on the dump is pretty nice with nice beveled glass windows.There are a few nice looking doors in there that should be worth a few bucks.
It's hard to tell today, but I'll bet that years ago (before that ugly addition on the back and closing in the front porch) it was a cute little house.
We're thinking alike on that one.I would fill the basement with all the non-organics it will hold, bust off the top couple feet of basement walls, then 2' of gravel compacted and some dirt on top. Since you are building a garage on the spot, it will make good foundation material.
Stuart,There are a few nice looking doors in there that should be worth a few bucks.
It's hard to tell today, but I'll bet that years ago (before that ugly addition on the back and closing in the front porch) it was a cute little house.

Maybe non-explosive demolition. They put expanding mortar into the holes, and when it expands it breaks all the mortar joints and the wall falls? I've heard of such things, but have no experience, or knowledge of the details.
Thanks for the tip Platonic. I will keep an eye out for termites when I get to the sills and foundation.I have a rental house built in 1920 with a cinder block foundation. It had a serious termite problem. The water table is high in that area (typically about 10 ft below grade) and the cinder block cavities were not filled. During renovation I discovered that the termites were going up through the inside of the cinder blocks into the sill. Termites love damp locations, live in nests in the ground and travel back and forth from the nest to the food source (in this case, my house) through mud tunnels.
Keep your eye out for signs of termite damage and mud tubes. They eat wood from the inside out, so what may appear as solid wood can be completely hollow. The workers are small, somewhat antlike and white. They seek to expand their colonies twice a year (spring and fall) when you’ll see swarms of what appear to be flying black ants coming from the ground. If they swarm inside the house, you’ll find large collections of little wings left behind.
If that house has termite issues, once the house is gone they will be seeking a new food source (your house). I’d suggest you keep termite killer on hand in the off chance that you unearth a nest. Goal is to expose and kill the queen. If you find termites, but not the nest, you’d be wise to make a trench barrier around your house.
Thanks for the heads up CNG, I will take care of it.With ready source of water . . . AND . . . wood in dilapidated house, I'd say you SHOULD take action to prevent future termite problems.
a) Pump water out of that basement ASAP out to the curb so it runs off the property entirely
b) Go ahead and put out bait traps for termites while the soil is still undisturbed. Don't wait to find the nests or damage later.
c) Plan on treating the soil once you get the house all torn down and begin disturbing the soil for foundation work.
EVERYWHERE there are termites . . . they just seek out the easy targets !!![]()
