House + Attached Garage → Bare Slab
A house and an attached garage on one slab in Charleston, Illinois — 40 by 22 with an 8 by 12 add-on hung off the side. Block and brick walls carrying a frame roof. The owner wanted the structure gone and the concrete left where it sat.
That last part changes the whole job. Leaving a sound slab in place is a legitimate way to keep the cost down when nothing is going back on that footprint right away — but it has to be decided at the walk, not halfway through, because it sets how the walls come down and where the machine can stand.
Masonry and framing don’t go to the same place, so we didn’t haul them the same way. The block and brick came off in five loads on our own tandem dump and went twelve miles to a clean-fill site — masonry that’s clean of wood, wire and insulation is fill, not landfill, and hauling it ourselves kept it out of a roll-off box. The roof, the add-on, and the contents of the house went into two 30-yard boxes, which is where the tipping fees actually live on a teardown this size.
Metal got pulled and hauled for scrap on the way through. That’s standard on every one of our jobs and it comes off the customer’s side of the ledger, not ours to argue about later.
On the paperwork: a single-family residence is exempt from the federal NESHAP asbestos inspection and the IEPA ten-day notice, which surprises most homeowners and saves real time. Inside city limits it still needed a Charleston demolition permit, and we pulled it. That combination — no survey required, one permit — is what a straightforward in-town house teardown looks like.
Down, hauled, boxes pulled, slab clean. One structure, one contractor, no second outfit called back to finish the haul-off.
