Get ready for some hidden costs when doing a knockdown.
My family is in the early stages of a knockdown rebuild.
Initially, I was surprised to find that demolishing a house and building a new one would actually be less expensive than simply building another level on the home we already had.
There were other benefits. A fixed price deal with a building company would mean we weren’t subjected to as many costly blowouts along the way. Though, as we were reminded constantly by friends and family, “there’s always something”.
One aspect of the project not covered by the building company was the knockdown … they only do the rebuild part.
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They did however recommend a demolition company that they had worked with before.
I sought quotes from that company and, in the interest of due diligence, two others.
Two of the three didn’t turn up to their quote appointments, or the rescheduled appointments (the standard Sydney tradie booking experience), so we settled on the quote from the
original demolition company recommended by the builder.
It turned out there was a lot more asbestos than we imagined.
The quote was $32,000 plus GST. Apparently this price is fairly normal. The only caveat was that there may be extra costs, depending on whether there was asbestos that needed expert attention and how much of it there was.
I knew there was definitely some there. When we moved in, there was a crudely constructed shed in the backyard with exposed asbestos in the walls that we plastered over to make a home office during Covid lockdown.
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We’d also uncovered some in the walls when renovating the bathroom a few years back.
So, we’d have to wait and see what the damage would be.
Then the phone calls began.
It turns out that my demolition guy was one of those people that liked to call you three times a day to tell you how hard the job was and talk you through his thought processes.
Each phone call was a minimum of 20 minutes, (longer if I had trouble ending the conversation).
The demolition went mostly well, but the costs blew out.
He wanted to know who renovated the property 20 years earlier? Of course I had no idea.
He wanted to know who owned all the cars parked on the street and whether I could organise them to move so he could get his machinery straight through the front fence. Again, no idea. Different people park up and down the street all the time. And then, finally the phone call that would cost me $13,000.
“I’m telling you, listen to me, I have never in 30 years of doing this, seen this much asbestos,” he said.
I found this hard to believe, considering Australia used asbestos for just about everything back in the 1950s and 60s, when a lot of the homes were built that had since been demolished. One in three homes built before 1990 are believed to still contain the deadly material in some form.
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The stripped back interiors early on in demolition week.
Still, there wasn’t much I could do but accept the punishment to my hip pocket.
I took comfort in the research that told me asbestos was only harmful when disturbed, so my family would be safe despite living with it in the walls, having never cut into it before.
Over the next few days, I heard about asbestos in all the walls, in the roof, buried in the ground, all the calls designed to set the scene for what I believed would be a monumental extra bill.
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The ‘four coffins’ of asbestos collected at demolition.
He even sent me a photo of what he described as “four coffins of asbestos”, to illustrate how much they had collected. He was right, it was a lot.
After a long week and many more phone calls, I was given a final bill of $48,000. That’s the original quote, plus GST, plus the $13,000 extra for asbestos removal.
All up, I think the demolition company did a great job, but beware, if you’re planning a knockdown, and there’s any chance there’s asbestos in your property, be prepared to pay a lot extra.
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