A few years ago we had a project to demo a house on the water, that was framed with structural steel. The steel had to be dismantled, repaired, primed, and reused on the same site.
Although this wasn't a true deconstruction project it required a little extra care.
I would definitley do a project like this again.
I always find that the owner/clients are the biggest variable. There's hard jobs and easy jobs. I would do all the hard jobs in the world for good clients/owners. I wouldn't want one easy job for a bad client/owner.

It seems that it is so labor intensive that it's realy not worth it, unless the salvage materials are very valuable.

I did one many years ago at the behest of NCDOT. There were 9 brand new houses that had been built right where a new bypass was going to pass thru a development. DOT bought out the houses (not all were complete but most were 90%) and contracted us to demo them. We had 30 days so we pu tan ad in the paper and allowed builders to take them down for reuse (and private partie with insurance). We got paid for the contract plus the income from the houses and some people got into some nice houses for not a lot of money.
Industrially I've done a fair amount of deconstruction where equipment salvage was the main goal. It can pay off pretty well provided there is a market for the gear.

We did a project of a old laundry building. We tore it down brick by brick and board by board. We salvaged all of the brick and all of the heart pine beams, rafters, and tongue and groove flooring through out. We lost our ass on it. We bid super cheap because we had a buyer lined up to purchase all of the materials from us and about 2 months into the job he wanted to cherry pick from the numerous stacks of salvaged materials. We ended up selling the antique brick for like a dime a piece and the heart pine for around .25 per board foot. It cost us more to take it down then we made selling it. If we could have just grabbed the brick with our excavator and loaded into our containers and taken it to our laydown yard and paid someone to chip, etc... but our laydown yard isn't zoned an inert landfill so dumping nonstacked brick would mean hefty fines if caught. So lessons learned. Never again unless its all under contract.

Exactly. It's just not worth it. Especially with the speed with which the excavator can plow through an old brick building. More efficient just to wreck it and dump it, the old fashioned way.

Unless somebody is standing right there with the bucks to buy the stuff off the jobsite.

Nice topic stimulation, Sir James. I have taken several rural.small buildings totally apart. and re-constructed at inner city addresses. out house. smokehouse and windmills. (Once sold a old outhouse to a couple of Lesbians for the garden tools....or whatever) Anyway, Larger stuff such as Timber framed barns for the fun of it when I was younger and folks used to give them to you free for the taking. I worked with a demo contractor to de construct a roof and cupolo's of the Richmond State Hospital in Richmond, Ind. several years back. (4) Big 22' Onion domed cupolo's built out of 8' X 8' timbers,popular and Zinc/metal roof's with cool finials. situated 3 stories in the air, craned them down and horiz, transported down Hyw. 70 into Indps. to a local Architectural salvage company.....not sure he has ever sold any of them, but thought the 1890's coolness was worth saving. Roof was slate with 2" X 6" oak and 6 flat beds of of that & 8" X 8"s that were purchased by a southern timber buyer. Project was labor inificent even for 6 yrs ago or so. labor cost only differed from timber purchase by about $5000 or so to the plus, but I felt we delayed the demo contractor and I Now... know what that does to the slim profit margin in demolition. About 2 yrs. ago, a bid package came our way from a firm out east that was looking for a demo/dis-mantle contractor to take apart a distillary in Ky. 95% reclaimation goal....all the bricks and timbers Salvaged, transported back East and reconstructed for offices or houseing. We didnt bid....anybody familiar or know how that project went? I can not even remember the town in Ky. America loves small buildings and structures, I say let's recycle the whole structure but $ seems to say otherwise most of the time. Thanks for the interest James......great forum folks. Happy holidays.

You hit the nail on the head, windwailer. It is commendable that you wanted to save the "1890's coolness of the cupola," and it is sad to see stuff like that get trashed all the time, but it just doesn't make economic sense to keep it, now does it? I guess it's good if people are willing to save the stuff even if they lose money, for sentimental reasons, but not many people would be willing to do that.

What ever happened to that cupola?

I think you all have nailed it. While I am all for saving things, unless you have buyers right on the spot, its just not worth it.

I have only been involved in a couple of them and one of them was to use the use the same materials to rebuild it again, which we did the entire project from the tear down to the rebuild.

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