Survey, licensed removal, air clearance and documentation. It comes first in the programme because nothing else can safely start until it is finished, and because it is what most often changes a demolition price.
This is the single largest variable in a demolition quote. Published cost data puts ordinary house demolition at roughly five to ten dollars a square foot; where there is significant asbestos in siding, roofing, flooring or insulation the same building runs two to three times higher, in the region of ten to thirty.
That gap is why a survey belongs before the price rather than after it, and why a quote given without one is a number that can move enormously. It is also why cheap quotes sometimes stay cheap by not looking. We survey first, price from what the survey found, and if it finds nothing the demolition is priced as ordinary work.
People look for corrugated sheeting and stop there. In buildings put up before the mid nineties it turns up in floor tile and the black adhesive beneath it, in textured coatings on ceilings, in insulating board behind soffits and around service risers, in gaskets, in cement flue pipes and in the rope seal round an old boiler door.
None of that is identifiable by eye, which is the whole reason for sampling rather than judging. The corollary is more useful than it sounds: a survey frequently comes back with far less than feared, and clearing three small locations is a very different job from stripping a building.
A lot. Published figures put ordinary house demolition around five to ten dollars a square foot and asbestos-heavy buildings at two to three times that. It is why the survey comes before the price.
Sheeting, but also floor tile and its black adhesive, textured ceiling coatings, insulating board, gaskets, flue pipes and boiler door seals. None of it is identifiable without sampling.
Often yes, where the work is in a sealed enclosure away from occupied areas. The clearance certificate is issued before the enclosure comes down, not after.
A few isolated locations can be days. A full strip is weeks. The notification period runs before either and is why programmes start earlier than people expect.
The survey, the notification, the air clearance certificate and the waste consignment notes. Keep them: they are what shows the building was cleared properly.
Customer reviews
What Hartford owners say about their demolition contractor
