House & Unit Demolition in Melbourne

What a full demolition covers

A house demolition is not one job, it is about eight of them stacked in the right order. Skip one and the whole program stalls. Ours runs like this: services abolished and certified, asbestos assessed and removed under licence, the building brought down, everything below ground grubbed out, waste sorted and carted, then the block levelled and compacted.

The bit most owners underestimate is what happens under the slab. Old footings, brick rubble from a previous demolition, redundant stormwater, a septic tank from before the street was sewered, the concrete base of a shed that was gone by 1980 — it is all still there and it all has to come out before a surveyor will set out a new build. We dig it out and cart it, rather than pushing it to a corner of the block and grading over the top.

Machines matched to the block

Melbourne gives you everything from a 900m² Reservoir block with a driveway you could park a truck on, to a 6-metre-wide Fitzroy terrace with a shared laneway. The machine decides the method, and the access decides the machine.

Where we can get a 20-tonne excavator in, the structure comes down fast and the sorting happens on the ground. Where the only way in is a side path or a right-of-way, we work with compact tracked machines, hand-strip the perimeter first, and take the roof off before touching walls. It is slower and we will say so in the quote rather than discovering it on day one and asking you for more money.

Attached and semi-detached work

Party walls, shared driveways and units that touch a neighbour need a different approach again: temporary propping, cut lines marked before anything starts, and a weatherproof make-good on the exposed face the same day it is opened up. Where the work affects an adjoining property, protection work notices under the Building Act come first — we tell you when that applies before you commit to a date.

Waste that gets sorted, not buried

Concrete, brick and masonry go out as clean rubble and come back into the supply chain as crushed aggregate. Steel goes to a scrap merchant. Clean timber is separated where it is worth separating. Contaminated and mixed loads cost the most to dispose of, so sorting properly on site is what keeps a demolition price honest — and it is exactly the corner that gets cut when a quote looks suspiciously cheap.

What you are left with

A level, compacted block, boundary pegs still visible, crossover and footpath intact, site fencing standing until you tell us to take it. Photographs of the cleared site and the disposal dockets go to you at completion — you will want them for your builder, and if the block ever changes hands, the next owner will want them too.