Demolition of the old sanitary facilities

After more than 50 years of use and despite a certain attachment to these old walls, the time had come to deconstruct the old sanitary buildings 😥

But there was no question of doing this any old way!

Step 1: before starting to demolish, we have to dismantle and recover everything that can be: light fixtures, switches, sockets, cables, coat racks, door hinges, bolts, taps, pipes, sinks, tiles... to reuse it later or donate it to a local association that promotes the reuse of DIY and construction products.

Step 2: we then deposited everything that could be sorted: metals, plastics, asbestos, wood... so that these materials could be revalued or properly recycled ♻️.

The asbestos sheets needed special treatment because it is a dangerous material ☣️ that does not recycle just anywhere and must be handled with care 😷. After carefully storing and filming it on a pallet we transported it 90 km from our home to a specialized center.

Step 3: We also removed the asbestos slabs, on part of the old showers that we had planned to keep for storage and now they no more have a roof ☝️. So we have to redo a part of the roof, reusing the beams and tiles we just dismantled on the other side!

Step 4: once the deconstruction is done, let's move on to the demolition 🚧 ! By hand for a few parts , then it's time for the machines! 🦺

We rented 2 mini excavators of 3 tons, the first with a BRH (Hydraulic Rock Breaker) to break the concrete and the other with different buckets to break the bricks and collect the rubble.

The operation generated 95 tons of rubble, that is 8 trucks, which were transported to the nearby quarry and then crushed to make recycled gravel, which will be used to build roads. Now there is only one big hole left and we already have a project for it... and it's not a pool 😜

January 2022