Demolition services
Twenty-one services in seven groups. If you are not sure which one your job is, start with what is left standing at the end and work back from there.
People arrive here asking for "demolition" and mean one of two quite different things. Either the building stays and the inside comes out, or the building goes. The first is an interior filing and a job measured in weeks. The second is a DOB demolition permit with utility certifications, adjoining-owner notice, rodent certification and a site safety submission behind it, and the front end takes longer than the work.
The groups below are ordered the way the work divides in practice rather than alphabetically. Interior first, because that is most of what gets asked for.
Every service
Interior demolition
Strip-outs and gut work inside an occupied building, where access, protection and noise rules decide how the job runs.
- Residential interior demolitionGut-outs of apartments, co-ops, brownstone floors and whole house interiors
- Bathroom demolitionFixtures, tile, mud beds and waterproofing taken back to the substrate
- Flooring demolitionTile, timber, carpet, adhesive and subfloor removal
- Insulation removalOld batt, loose-fill and board insulation extracted and bagged
- Basement demolitionCellar strip-outs, slab breaking and below-grade clearance
- Selective demolitionPrecise removal where the building around it has to survive intact, by hand where a machine cannot go
Structure removal
Whole buildings and outbuildings taken down under a DOB demolition filing.
- Structure demolitionAny whole structure taken down under a demolition filing, not only a dwelling
- House demolitionWhole dwellings taken down under permit, lot cleared to grade
- Garage and outbuilding demolitionGarages, barns and sheds down, slab out, ground made good
- Residential exterior demolitionExtensions, porches, stoops, chimneys and facade elements
Exterior and grounds
Everything outside the walls: concrete, hardscape, pools, decks and yard structures.
Commercial and industrial
Tenant spaces, retail, warehouse and multi-storey work, sequenced around a building that stays open.
Site work and clearance
Getting a lot from cleared to buildable, and getting the debris off it legally.
Filings and compliance
The paperwork that decides your start date, and the violations that block it.
Urgent response
Unsafe structures and situations that cannot wait for a scheduled slot.
Which category is your job in
The second question, after what stays standing, is whether the building is a home or a business. A partition comes down the same way in a shop as in an apartment. What changes is everything around it: who sets the rules, what you are contractually required to strip back to, how the material leaves, and what happens to the people still using the building.
Who sets the rules
In a home. In a co-op or condo it is the alteration agreement: hours, which lift you get and for how long, the protection standard for common areas, and what has to be on file before access is granted. In a private house it is mostly the DOB filing and your neighbours.
In a business. The lease, and specifically its reinstatement clause, which defines the condition the space has to be handed back in. That one clause can swing a strip-out substantially, and it is the most common cause of an argument at handover.
What finished means
On a residential gut, finished is usually obvious: back to studs, slab and risers, ready for the next trade.
On a commercial strip-out, finished means whatever the lease says. Back to the demise, back to shell and core, or back to a specific schedule of condition. These are materially different scopes. Read the clause before anyone quotes, and if it is ambiguous, get it clarified in writing while you still have leverage.
How the material moves, and when
In a home, a service lift with a booked window, a stair in a walk-up, or a kerbside container where the property has a driveway. Volumes are smaller but the route is often worse. The work generally runs in normal daytime hours, because that is what the building allows and what the neighbours will accept.
In a business, a loading dock and goods lift if you are lucky, a chute or hoist on a bigger job. Volumes are much larger and the building usually restricts when you can use any of it. In an occupied building the work frequently runs overnight or at weekends, because that is the only time the noise and the goods lift are available. That is a real cost difference and a real scheduling difference for everyone involved.
What only commercial jobs bring
- Grease-laden extract ductwork from restaurant kitchens, which is a contaminated removal rather than clean metal.
- Raised access floors and ceiling grids, which are fast to remove but produce enormous volume.
- Redundant mechanical, electrical and plumbing that has to be traced back to a point of isolation rather than simply cut.
- Shopfronts and signage fixings, which usually involve the public footway.
- Neighbouring tenants who keep trading, which turns dust and noise control into a boundary problem rather than a room problem.
What does not change, and where each route goes
The asbestos rule applies identically. A pre-1987 commercial building needs an ACP-5 exactly as a pre-1987 apartment does. Disposal rules are the same: covered, documented loads to a permitted transfer station, and material contaminated with asbestos or lead cannot travel as construction and demolition debris regardless of whose building it came out of.
So the route is offices, retail and restaurant strip-outs for a business, interior demolition for a gut renovation for a home that stays standing, and taking a house down when the building goes.
What decides the price
Every demolition is priced from the same short list of variables. Here is what they are, so you can see what a quote is responding to and work out roughly where your own job sits.
Access, before anything else
This is the factor that moves the price furthest.
The same 900 square foot apartment strip-out is a completely different job on the ground floor with a driveway than it is on the fourth floor of a walk-up, or in a tower with a two-hour daily service lift window. Same scope, same volume, same tools, potentially double the labour.
When you compare quotes, check that each contractor has understood how material actually leaves your building. A quote that assumed kerbside loading on a job that needs a stair is not a cheaper quote, it is a wrong one.
Weight, not volume
Debris is charged and hauled by weight far more than by apparent size. That is why a small bathroom can cost more than a large bedroom.
A prewar bathroom floor is usually a thick cement mud bed on wire lath. Concrete is dense. Plaster and lath is heavier than drywall. A modest room full of any of these fills a container by weight long before it fills it by volume, and the load count is what you are paying for.
Asbestos
If the building predates April 1987 and the work needs a permit, an assessment is required. That has a cost and, more importantly, a programme position: it sits ahead of everything.
If it comes back positive above threshold, licensed abatement has to happen before demolition can start. That is a separate contractor, a separate permit and a separate line in the budget. It is the largest single swing factor on an older building, which is why finding out early matters so much.
Whether anything needs holding up
Removing a non-structural partition is straightforward. Removing anything carrying load means designed temporary support: needles, props or shoring, installed before the element comes out.
That brings an engineer, a design and materials into a job that might otherwise have been two people and a container. If a quote for removing a structural wall does not mention temporary support, ask why.
How much of the filing you are asking for
There is a real difference between "demolish this" and "get us to the point where demolishing this is legal". Utility disconnect requests, adjoining-owner notice, rodent certification, the site safety submission and the asbestos coordination are all work, and how the filing runs is set out in full on the permitting page.
Decide which of it you are carrying and which you want carried, and make sure the quotes you are comparing assume the same answer.
The smaller factors that still add up
- Occupied buildings. Sealed separation, agreed hours and protected routes cost time.
- Out-of-hours working. Often unavoidable in commercial buildings, and priced accordingly.
- Reinforcement. Reinforced concrete takes several times longer than plain concrete of the same thickness.
- Separation. Material that arrives at the facility already sorted costs less to handle than a mixed load.
- Distance to a permitted transfer station. Longer runs mean fewer loads per day.
- Anything that cannot travel as construction and demolition debris, such as tanks, appliances or contaminated material, which needs its own route.
How to get a real number
Tell us the address, roughly when the building went up, what is coming out, what has to stay, and how a truck reaches the door. That is usually enough to scope the job on the phone and tell you which of the factors above apply to yours.
The firm number comes after we have seen the site, because access and what is behind the finishes are the two things a photograph cannot settle.
Not sure which one you need?
Call and describe the job in plain terms. What room or building, roughly what age, what is coming out, what has to survive, and whether anyone is living or trading there during the work. That is enough for us to tell you which service applies, which filing it needs, and whether asbestos sits on your critical path.
Tell us what is coming out
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