House demolition in Adelaide

House demolition

If you are building a new home and have anything but a vacant building block, demolishing your house is clearly unavoidable. Thankfully, it's a fairly straightforward process of requesting inspections and quotes from a few demolition companies, making your choice, getting development approval (where required), and then leaving the work to the professionals.

For them to proceed, however, you will need to have had your services disconnected or removed as appropriate - a quoting demolition contractor can help you with information appropriate to your situation or you can contact your gas, electricity and water providers. For what might soon be a building site, water services are likely to still be required, but your gas service will need to be disconnected and removed.

When arranging removal of your gas service be absolutely clear about what you require - you are demolishing a house and need the service not just disconnected, but removed. Confusion here can escape detection until your demolition company arrives on site and is unable to proceed due to a gas service being in place. When last checked, ETSA require a lead-time of about 20 business days (essentially a month) to correct a mistake like this and you are unlikely to have any recourse to lost time or money. If you're renting elsewhere or trying to meet a building deadline, this sort of trap just wastes time so don't be afraid to really stress with ETSA what it is that you actually require.

House demolition sale

Some demolition company quotes will be with the assumption of salvage rights to what they see when they inspect. Make sure that if you intend to host something of a house demolition sale, you clear this with them first as there is no point locking in a deal and arguing over money part-way through the job because roofing tiles are missing, for example. Some things like older tiles, sought-after bricks, timber flooring or metal components can impact the quotes you receive.

If cleared with the demolition contractor, hosting a house demolition sale can be a good way to offset the cost of the impending demolition. By that point, anything in the house is not on your list to keep, so you should take the opportunity to make a few bucks from scavengers or those with a keen eye for antiques. You never know what people might want - light fittings, old kitchen cabinets, tapware, troughs, etc.

Yvette says her husband was too busy to try a final sale of bits of pieces from their house and left her to her own devices. "I put a tonne of bits and pieces - doors, taps, an old stove, etc - on eBay and marked the auctions as pick-up only. Only took a morning of photos and uploading and made me $800 which will go towards our kitchen appliances in the new house."

House demolition council approval

If you can save significant money using a cheaper contractor for your house demolition but it means submitting your own documentation to council, don't be scared off. The council development application forms for demolition can be a bit daunting, but if you provide what you can and then insert a reference to your demolition contrator ("For details, please contact x on yyyy yyyy"), this will often suffice. You can nearly always call your council to find out more and have them step you through the process.