Step 1: Find a lovely house (like this one on Northcrest Ave. in Salt Lake City) in dis-repair that needs some love, because during this process, you will need love- and lots of it. Make sure the foundation is sound. Make sure it’s skeleton structure is amazing. Without good bones, you’ll be building a new home instead of remodeling. If you’re going to demolish a house, make sure its built for excellent design no matter the time period. Is it? Then move on to Step 2.
Step 2: This part is important to remember! Make sure you have a good crew. People who know homes, the tools, details about historical homes, electrical work, plumbing…what to keep, what to break, and how to break it. Icon Homes has an amazing team led by Superintendent, Jason ___. Jason is from Seattle where he worked on many historical homes. Icon happens to have two amazing teams- one that attacks the interior, and the other that attacks the exterior.
Step 3: Have a plan. Are you going to do it in a week? The team working on the Northcrest home gutted it in just one week. For some, it may take longer. Where are you going to put all of the stuff inside? Are you going to re-purpose items? Are you going to sell them? Salt Lake has some excellent resources and teams that will come in to do this part of the work for you. What about the stuff you are throwing away? Do you have a dumpster? Proper equipment and planning goes a very long way.
Plan. Then think about it some more. Sleep on it. Then do some more planning. Repeat if necessary.
Step 4: Be meticulous and start early in the job to avoid a long, problems that can snowball. It’s a lot harder to deal with problems at the end of a project than it is to prevent them at the beginning. If you have a team member like Jason, this won’t be a problem.
Step 5: Safety, safety, safety! It’s a nice feeling going home, after a tough day on the job, knowing that all of the employees entrusted to you for that day made it home safe and sound to their families. Make sure your sub-contractors know that you value safety. It’s easy to become complacent, especially during this grueling part of the project. Don’t let this be an excuse for overlooking safety. And don’t let it be used as an excuse for your workers either.
Step 6: Take care of yourself. You can’t be on the job for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Icon encourages their team members to have a life/work balance, so that when they go to work each day, they can give 100% and to do their best work to take care of anything and everything that comes up.
Demolishing the interior of a house is about removing its physical landscape to make way for new things. Materialism is superficial in the extreme, yet, in moderation, natural. Humans have always had things, no matter how small or how simple. Whether functional or sentimental, we need things. Not in the same way that we need food, water, and other people, but we do need them.
We build a home to store these things, to spend time with loved ones, to protect ourselves from the world. People are born in homes; people die in homes. They celebrate birthday parties, they get married. But homes are special not only for the momentous occasions that take place there. They are special for the mundane. So, tearing down old, will make way for new. Do it with pride and purpose.
