Terrace renovation part 1 - Demolition
Note: This post is a part of my story about house renovation.
This Terrace Sucks
As almost everything in the property we bought is fucked up, or not done precisely, the same applies to the terrace next to the house. Somebody in the past was thinking that it will be a good idea to make it 30 cm above the ground level, which is crazy (I have found later, during the demolition process, that it was probably because of the sole laziness) Also, two best friends of mine are on the wheelchairs, and I want them to occasionally come and have a beer with us, so this terrace is a no-go!
But this is not the only reason. Much worse thing is, that one of the supporting walls is completely broken, the ceiling that holds the terrace floor is cracked and collapsing - because of the bricks failure. The bricks have just fallen apart (probably due to humidity) and in general, the whole old terrace is all pretty fucked overall. See this picture taken from the side and check the gap between the steel beam and the wall - there is about 20 cm gap which mean that the only things that holds something are the steel beams levitating in the air - the supporting wall is there for nothing, since it was “swallowed” by the ground. As I have found out later, the wall had no foundations at all - it was just, like, 10 cm of concrete “foundations” deep in the ground. In reality, it should be around 80 cm deep in the ground (the no-frost level).
Demolition Of The Old Terrace
The obvious step was to get rid of the old terrace, which is made from tiles and 3 layers of very tough concrete. First, I have tried to cut it into evenly-sized pieces of concrete using big angle grinder first, but it took ages, made a lot of dust and the result was not convincing at all, apart from making the (pretty expensive) diamond cutting disc dull pretty fast. So I have picked up my 20kg electric demolition hammer (code name shao-lin) and over the course of 1 day I destroyed all of it.
It produced around 6 tons of concrete - so I ordered container for demolition waste, and loaded it up - loading the container took several hours. There is one big thing that sucks very much when doing this type of work (moving materials of all sorts). It is something that needs to be done, but in fact, it is not a productive work, meaning no end result, meaning that my heart is sad. I want to build stuff, not move the shit around. And one more thing that suck: Demolition waste disposal is pretty expensive 😭.
Terrace + Outdoor Kitchen? Yeah!
There was a small room that used to be kind of a workshop (aka man-cave), next to the terrace. So me and my wife got an idea to make it an outdoor kitchen connected directly to the terrace. That posed a new challenge. We needed to move all the stuff out of the room and get rid of almost all the useless things we found and then work with the demolition hammer once again!
I had to remove old concrete floor in that room, that was cracked and pretty beaten up and then make a hole for future doors, that will connect the kitchen with terrace.
At Least The Terrace Roof Is Nice
Or not. First, I thought I will leave it, and just coat it with the fresh paint. However, after closer inspection, the wood turned to be in pretty desperate condition, too. The visible side looked nice, but the under the roof, the wood was practically hollow, due to water leaking from the roof. And the time took care of the rest.
That means even more work to do (and more money well spent). Yay! 😂
Ready for work?
Everything is ready now for the fresh building now. Since I am working mainly over weekends, just the demolition of all the stuff and clearing the place took few of them. But now, I am looking forward to actually start building something. This will be presented in future blog posts!
If interested, you can check rest of the posts about house renovation.