Dealing with Debris on Demo Day

HGTV has created some unrealistic expectations for owners looking to handle their own home renovation or room remodel project. While the entire demolition process is condensed into a 2-minute segment, the reality is that demolition can take anywhere from several days to a few weeks when you’re working on your own.

Demolition may be much less fun and more tedious than you imagined, but there are a few preparatory steps you can take to avoid costly mistakes and make sure everything goes as smoothly as an inherently messy process can allow.

Protect Your Belongings

Demo Tips Something often overlooked when beginning demolition is that everything is going to get dirty much more quickly than you imagined. As soon as you start removing drywall and plaster, dismantling floors and sawing wood, you’re going to release clouds of dust and debris into the air. Not only will this coat everything in the room, but it will also travel to other areas if you don’t seal your doors with plastic and lay tarps down around the house.

The best course of action is to completely empty the room before demolition begins and cover anything you can’t move in plastic. You may need to vacuum, dust, open your windows and change your HVAC system’s air filters along the way, too.

Dress Properly

Speaking of dust, it’s not healthy to inhale it directly. Home improvement stores sell dust masks and even full-face respirators for sites with excess particulate matter in the air.

Wear clothes you won’t mind getting dirty or slip into coveralls to shield yourself from debris. As for shoes, choose something with a thick sole, like boots, to protect your feet from sharp nails, screws and scrap metal.

Do Your Research

You can’t huck sledgehammers into walls willy-nilly. You may inadvertently destroy a part of your home that you wanted to keep intact all because you were overeager for demo day.

Here are some things to check for before you start knocking walls down:

Load-bearing structures
Electrical wiring
Water pipes
Natural gas pipes
Asbestos, lead paint, mold and other toxic materials

You’re going to need a lot more than a sledgehammer to get the job done. Stock up on other tools like a flat pry bar, crowbar and cordless electric drill to speed up the process and protect usable materials from unintended damage.

Rent a Roll-Off

Demo Tips You’ve taken care to protect your belongings, the structural integrity of your house and yourself, but what do you do once the debris starts piling up? You can’t work around heaps of drywall, trim and rolled up carpet, and your local garbage service isn’t equipped to transport the type of materials you’re demolishing.

Luckily, you can rent a dumpster – also called a roll-off – from gotTRASH? and have it conveniently delivered and parked right at your house. Just load the debris into the dumpster as you work, then call us to dispose of your trash when you’re done.

There are a few rules to remember before renting:

Only park the dumpster on the street if you have a permit
Choose the right roll-off size – they range from 10 to 40 cubic yards
Give the disposal company room to pick the dumpster up
Only partially fill dumpsters with heavy materials like stone

Order Your Demolition Dumpster From gotTRASH?

You can’t tackle a major demolition project without somewhere to store the debris. At gotTRASH?, we provide dumpsters to residents in Western New York during remodels and renovations. Once you’ve loaded your dumpster with rubble, we haul it away so you can focus on the task at hand.
Our dumpsters can hold: