I've got a property where a house will built. Currently there's this little hut that needs to be completely removed to make room for building a real house. To keep costs down, I'll be doing most of the tear-down myself.
The hut is roughly 30 square meters and around 60 years old. It appears to be put together rather simply:
- it has single-pane windows, wooden-board walls, and wooden rafters hold up the roof.
- There's a concrete foundation under the outside walls but apparently not underneath most of the inside area. The inside flooring is vinyl that is very soft in many places; presumably there's wood underneath that has become rotten. About a third of the inside area is tile (looks like a later addition) and I expect that there's a reasonably solid concrete foundation underneath that.
- There's no heating at all, and no gas, but there is electrical cabling throughout, and a sink. I've already turned off the main water pipe where it enters the property. There's also a main fuse box at the property's edge where I can simply remove the fuses (old ceramic-body type) to make sure the power's off.
According to the previous owner and builder whom I can't ask anymore, the hut was originally a bear cage from a zoo that was being closed - this was pre-war times when people reused all sorts of things! If that's true then there might be a very sturdy steel frame in there somewhere. It's likely too, because the hut was hit by a large falling tree in a storm once, and it withstood it with barely a scratch. I think most normal garden huts would've been obliterated.
What's the best way to tear this down? With "best" I mean simple, cheap, effective.
What tools will I need? Will regular "household" DIY tools suffice? My circular saw will probably be very useful, but I think I would need to rent a very powerful chisel to remove the foundation, at least.
I also plan to rent a big general-purpose dumpster to put the rubble in -- otherwise I'd have to spend weeks to cart everything to our local recycling center where they'd make me hand-sort the rubble into metals/glass/stone/wood/cardboard/etc.