The house razing

About a week and a half ago our old family farm house was knocked down. It was built by my great grandparents along with most of the buildings on the farm. My grandpa and his sister grew up in that house. My dad and his siblings grew up in that house. Many of my cousins spent so much time there that they may as well have grown up there. So a lot of people had strong attachments to that place.

But the house had issues. Much of the kitchen needed replacing once the linoleum went soft from the termites undermining it. The plumbing wouldn't last long at a family gathering because it just couldn't handle all those people flushing in such short order. The lights upstairs would come on when the toaster was used. If you hooked up a computer the wiring would hiss at you. Hiss, not hum. The foundation was cracked. Snakes would crawl in through holes in the retaining walls. And when trying to rewire some light switches we'd find that the baseboards were held in place where the wallpaper touched them more than by the studs they were supposed to be nailed to. The studs were eaten and rotten. It was a problem.

So Mom and Dad are building their old age home. The original plan was to build in the yard north of the old house, salvage what they could while the new house was being built, and then, with the old house stripped, push the old house into it's own basement and bury it. But a septic tank can't be put in that soil, so they have to build a sewage lagoon. Several options were suggested, but the only one that actually worked was the place they planned to build the house. Which means the new house had to be built on the site of the old house. And since the framers were only available in early June AND the concrete must be a month old before framing could be done AND the old foundation had to be removed before the concrete could be poured it meant that the timetable for removing the old house was very fast.

Many people who wanted to say goodbye couldn't make it back in time to do it. So I made sure to be there to video tape the whole thing. There were technical difficulties. The battery was short lived and we had to rig up alternative power sources that restricted movement. There's a change in camera at one point that I edited in when the main camera was out of power. The wind was fierce and blew over the camera a couple of times.

The efforts to salvage the flooring were difficult. It was well installed and wouldn't come up without breaking. You'll see that when the wrecker tries to knock out the second floor ... floor. Similarly, the kitchen cabinets were built in and weren't going to come out for anything. The whole wall comes out, but the cabinets remain. The guy running the wrecker didn't want to have to scoop everything out of the basement, so he uses the floor of the main level as a platform to knock things on to and scrape off rather than knock it in. The floor and basement were handled the next day. Mom taped it, but I had to head back east. The video ends with everything above the flooring of the main floor gone and a look at the hole which all the broken concrete from the house and an old fallen silo will go into.



I also have footage of a tour of the house and the removal of the trees from around the house. If anyone wants me to post that, I will. I figured the demolition was the main point.

And here's the floor plan of the house with some hurried measurements. I got the room dimensions, but didn't get the placement of the doors and windows. And the basement is the size of the main floor so I didn't bother drawing it up. The little mud room tacked on the the bottom of the main room wasn't measured, but it's the depth of a window and the space at the lower left corner where the exterior walls meet was more or less square. With this, an architect can draw up new plans if anybody in the family wants to rebuild the house.