Demolition Day Two:
The following week the mixed debris recycling container was picked up and the concrete container was dropped off in its place. When the weekend arrived I still had cuts and scrapes from the first round of demo, but knew I had to get rid of all the concrete the thing was sitting on. I rented a jackhammer from Home Depot along with some new safety glasses, heavier duty gloves to handle the concrete once it was turned into rubble, and some construction ear plugs as I didn’t want to use my fancy musician’s ear plugs for this type of task.
The start of the day when things still looked peaceful.
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Near the end of the prior demolition day, one of my tasks was to determine what I’d gotten myself into in terms of the concrete demolition. The perimeter of the foundation was all 8” CMU blocks. Typically these are stacked in an offset pattern like bricks, rebar is run through the holes, and then they’re backfilled with sand. I took the sledgehammer, then the wrecking bar and quickly pried the block on the northeast corner of the slab loose. A quick kick and I was able to see the exposed edge of the poured slab. What I was researching was whether or not the blocks were containing dirt backfill with a slab floating on top, or if the whole thing was filled with concrete. In modern days it would be absurd to use that much concrete when dirt is so much cheaper, but remember that this was built in 1946 when concrete was super cheap, or so I’m told by the construction engineers in my office. This was going to have a major impact on the cost of the job, as well as my ability to do it without hiring a contractor. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered not only that it was dirt backfilled, but also that the slab was a mere 2-3” thick and appeared to have no reinforcing bars or mesh installed. Things were looking up!
This? This is doable.
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Fast forward to concrete demo day. I was a little nervous about operating the jackhammer, having never done it before. There’s a bit of a learning curve with that particular tool. I was also surprised, although in retrospect I shouldn’t have been, at how taxing it is to your hands and wrist to operate one. By the end of the process my fingers were stiff and everything ached from my fingertips to halfway down forearms. It was really quite a miserable experience.
My research suggested that the most efficient way of jackhammering concrete was to start on a corner and work out from there while utilizing any angular breaks in the surface of the concrete. Once you had one “course” busted up you go back through and clear it out so that the subsequent course has room to move out from the larger, still intact piece. Made sense to me, and I didn’t have the experience to argue. I took to breaking loose the entire top row of blocks. This was a breeze. It took ten minutes to remove the entire top row. To say that my spirits were high would be an understatement. I proceeded on as described from the corners of the slab. It was considerably more difficult than the blocks, but it wasn’t bad. I was making great progress, but I knew that my initial plan of having it done in one day was simply not possible. The jackhammer wore me out rapidly. I had planned on hammering until 5:00pm when the noise to the surrounding neighbors would be rude considering the evening was beginning. By 2:30pm I was cooked. The sun was blazing for Seattle, I was tired, everything ached, and my wife was basically pleading with me to stop for the day. As per usual, she’s quite a bit smarter than me and I finally acquiesced to her. I should have stopped about an hour before because my last 5-10 courses saw me get both greedy and lazy. I was too tired to take the time to properly clear a finished course and just kept hammering. What happens when there isn’t room for the concrete to move is that the pieces that break loose get progressively smaller and smaller. The end of the day was spent picking up handfuls of these continuously reducing in size pieces that were a pain in the butt. They weren’t as heavy, but when you have to make three trips to cover the space of one done correctly (i.e. clear the area from the previous course before starting a new one) it makes the cleanup take a whole heck of a lot longer.
When your wife is telling you that there’s no point in killing yourself to get something done that can be finished tomorrow… Listen to her.
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We cleaned up everything for the night and proceeded to pass out a little earlier than normal. The next day I was determined to not have the process take the entire afternoon. I got to hammering and in no time had the slab finished off. A few loads and the whole thing was in the concrete container. It was certainly happy times.
Getting close to finished now!
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Remember that block wall I mentioned previously? I was excited to go at this thing. My plan? Take my mattock, which is a tool that has a pick axe on one side and a… ahem… hoe on the other, and using that I would dig a small trench on the inside face of the wall. That would free up enough room for me to give it a good whack or two with the sledge. That should loosen up the sand and the joints enough to be able to remove the rebar tying everything together. Once that was gone a few more obligatory thumps with Mr. Sledge and the whole thing should come crashing down in a very satisfying display. This amount of preamble should be your cue to start giggling. I took one smack with the sledge and all it did was make me hurt. The wall smiled back and I swear I heard it snickering. I gave it another whack, then a smack, then one last crack and said “Oh screw this!” My wife walks over and (remember the part where I said she’s smarter than me?) brushes away the dirt on top of the blocks. She asks me what the holes were supposed to be filled with. I told her that it was commonly sand. She does some more clearing to reveal that these had no less than two #4 bars in each hole of the blocks (three holes per block) and all of them were filled with concrete. Full stop. This level of demo now exceeds the capability of my sledgehammer, wrecking bar and jackhammer. I was also running out of time as the week was about to start anew and I had to go back to my pesky day job. I had won the battle, but lost the war. I decided that rather than killing myself to bring the walls down I would instead hire someone to do the final demolition and haul away the approximately 13.3 cubic yards of dirt encased within.
