When starting any reconstruction process, the demolition comes first.
In my experience, this usually means a bunch of folks coming in with sledgehammers and knocking down the parts of the building that aren’t slated to be reused.
Very quickly.
The next step is to load all the demo’d material into a dumpster and have it hauled off. This can end up being load after load of those big construction dumpsters.
In our building, the demo took a couple of weeks.
Zaman’s workers (Zaman was our contractor from Z Works Design/Build), carefully dismantled the interior of the building. They pulled nails and screws from the wood and took the used nails/screws to the recycling plant. Then, they sorted all the boards, plywood, insulation, and lighting.
The only things that went into the dumpster were things that couldn’t or shouldn’t be re-used in any capacity. The items that we knew that we couldn’t use, but were usable by others, were either sold on Craigslist or given away on Austin Freecycle.
After seeing the demo done this way, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. It was simple and it just made sense. We paid more in labor costs, but we saved money in materials by being able to reuse perfectly good materials.
We ended up re-using the following:
- Approximately 4500 square feet of plywood.
- About 80 flourescent lights. These were of the ’shop’ variety but Zaman custom made new covers for them so they would look less shoppy and more modern.
- Insulation. The building is a steel building. The insulation that came out of it was still in great shape and re-usable. The R factor that the insulation provided was very good already.
- All interior doors
- Existing tempered and/or double-paned glass.
We ended up selling or giving away:
- An air conditioning unit
- Hay lights
- Tons of 2×4s ad 2×6s
- Sinks
- A couple of toilets
- Plumbing fixtures
- Untempered glass
We were able to recycle the following materials:
- Assorted plumbing and electrical items
- Nails and Screws
The following had to go to the landfill:
- Old drywall
- Building materials that were unusable (such as water damaged insulation)
- wiring
The original building had concrete slab floors so we didn’t have any floor coverings to dispose of.
Photos (click on the images for a better view):
Reusing the insulation as sound barriers in the conference rooms and some of the offices.
The original building had an existing mezzanine with a plywood floor that we demo’d. We were able to reuse the plywood as our subfloor in the second floor of the new construction.
A stack of 2×6s awaiting reuse.
