What Choices Do You Have for Tearing Down Your Home?

When you're unhappy with your current home, you may not necessarily need to sell it and move. If you love the location or find that just certain aspects of your home's overall construction and footprint are not to your liking, you can tear it down and rebuild or perform some major renovations. Demolishing your home may seem like a big step, but there are some choices and options you have for this work and how it's done. Note a few of those choices here so you can discuss these with a demolition contractor.

Interior demolition

If you ever watch a home improvement show where they make major renovations to a home, you may note how they tear out interior walls and rip up all the flooring, taking the home right down to the studs and framework. This is called an interior demolition, where just inside parts of the home are demolished. This is often done if the home needs major work on the plumbing and electrical systems, as this allows you easier access to the pipes and wiring behind the walls. This also allows you to change the footprint of the home, as you can remove studs used to create interior walls. New insulation can also be added to make the home more energy-efficient.

An interior demolition may also be done to just a certain part of your home. If you're not happy with the kitchen and back area of the house or want to change how the front rooms flow to the back, you can have a partial interior demolition performed on just those areas. The home is then rebuilt to your preferences. You can also more easily recycle materials you remove from the home with an interior demolition, as these materials are often pulled out by hand so they're easy to sort and take to a demolition recycling center.

Implosion

If you're worried about the time it would take to demolish a larger home, note that an implosion can be an option, even for residential houses. These implosions are very controlled and usually are set inside the home, to help break up the frame and other building materials so they don't all need to be taken down with a bulldozer. Don't assume that an implosion is too loud or would be upsetting to your residential neighborhood; demolition contractors work with implosion experts who use charges just strong enough to break up building materials but which aren't going to disrupt your neighbors, damage the property, and so on.