Portal frames, cladding, roof sheets, mezzanines and the slab beneath. Steel is weighed off and credited against the price rather than quietly kept, and the survey is settled before anything is cut.
A portal-framed warehouse is mostly recoverable steel, and its scrap value is large enough to change the number at the bottom of a quote. Some contractors price the demolition and keep the steel; others weigh it off and credit it back.
Both are legal and only one is transparent, so ask which you are being given before you compare two prices that look similar. We weigh at a licensed yard, hand over the tickets, and set the credit against the invoice as its own line.
Commercial demolition carries a notification period to the regulator, and it runs in calendar days whether or not you have started. It sits alongside the asbestos survey, which on a building of this age will usually find something in the roof sheet, the flashing or the gasket rather than nowhere at all.
Both of these are known before a quote is written, so a programme that has the machine arriving next week is a programme that has not filed anything. We file the notification the day the job is engaged and book the survey in the same week, because those two clocks run in parallel and neither of them run faster for being ignored.
You do if the quote says so. We weigh at a licensed yard, hand you the tickets and credit the steel as a separate line. If a competing quote does not mention steel, ask who is keeping it.
Machine work is usually one to three weeks depending on span and height. The notification period and the asbestos survey run before that and are the reason most programmes are six to ten weeks end to end.
In a building put up before the mid nineties, very often, and usually in roof sheets, flashing or gaskets rather than everywhere. The survey tells you before the price is fixed rather than after.
If you want it out, yes, and it is worth deciding early. Slab removal changes the muckaway volume more than any other line, and crushing it on site for reuse as fill is usually cheaper than hauling it away.
Yes. Party wall protection, dust suppression and agreed working hours are priced in from the start, and we would rather over-hoard than have the neighbour stop the job in week two.
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