Demolition

It was almost exactly two years ago from today that the old house was demolished. Facebook reminded me about it earlier today so I figured I’d continue where I left off.

Our tenants moved out of the old house at the end of June and our permit to build was officially submitted to the city on June 17th. With construction imminent, I ended up buying a time-lapse camera (a Brinno TLC-200) because I wanted to be able to capture every moment of the build and use it as something to look back on. I’d seen a few construction videos folks had done in the past and it looked like a lot of fun. With plenty of wood and supplies in the old house I ended up building something that looked a lot like a self-standing basketball post. It was basically a 10′ tall 2×6 attached to a base that was weighted down with two 60 lb bags of cement. With that I thought I’d be able to position the camera around the property as the building progressed.

Since the old house had one of those popular asbestos popcorn ceilings, we had to have a special crew come out to remove it before it could be demolished. I was somewhat familiar with the process since my mom had a condo in Hawaii with asbestos, and the folks removing it basically sealed all of the windows/doors, soaked down the ceiling and then scraped away the popcorn in to some hazardous waste bags.

I remember being slightly surprised the day that the asbestos abatement crew was out working on the house. I knew the process involved covering up the windows, but I remember things feeling really eerie. The windows were all covered up with white sheets, lights inside the house were all on, and the screens had been broken in a few locations around the house. The garage door was forcefully opened with a broom handle, and a trail of broken light bulbs leading to the back yard. It really felt like somebody had broken in to the house and set up a meth lab.

Thankfully there was no meth lab, but I didn’t expect the garage to be ransacked. I was storing a few items there that I was planning on picking up before the demolition. The box of light-bulbs and a vintage all-metal drill were two items that I was actually on my way to the house that day. The drill was gone and a number of the bulbs were broken and littered around the house. They led me on a trail to the back yard where I noticed the pole I had built was laying on the ground and the brand new time-lapse camera was gone. I’m guessing the crew thought that the camera was recording them. I talked to one of the retired neighbors who had a prime view of the house and they told me that the asbestos guys were the only folks at the house that day and he noted how strangely they operated. I was 90% sure that they stole the camera after they were caught stealing things from the garage. Joke is on them though, since the camera wasn’t on..

I ended up filing a police report, but knew that nothing was likely going to happen. It was annoying as the camera was close to $200, and something I was on edge about purchasing to begin with. As painful as it was to shell out more cash for another camera, I did end up buying another since I really did want footage of the construction.

I didn’t know what settings to use for the camera and had spent time looking online for suggestions. A lot of folks with construction cameras had suggested that you take a picture every 30 minutes with 30 fps so that over the course of a 10-12 hour day you’d end up with almost a second of footage. Over the course of 10 months that would make the video like 4 minutes in length. For the demolition I thought that I’d double the footage to 15 minutes per picture since I wanted the resulting video to be a little longer.

So I set up the camera to take a picture every 15 minutes thinking that this would probably take a week to complete. My calculations were so far off it was almost comical. The bulk of the demolishing was probably done in the first 4 hours. The rest of the time was basically filling the dumpsters and waiting for trucks to empty them. The resulting video at 30 fps ended up lasting about half a second.

So October 19th, 2016 the old house was gone and it was now waiting time for the permit to be approved so that we could move on to the next phase.