Destroyed the rest of the framework with the recipro and then attacked the slab. The left side of the shed had a concrete floor which I was reasonably sure had been badly done – it was on a significant slope, and one part had split off and fallen further down the hill – but the first job was to work out how big a job it was going to be.
Attacked it a bit with my big hammer drill and a chisel bit, but that didn’t make a lot of impact (hur hur). Hit it a few times with the pointy end of a massive crowbar I inherited with the block and…a chunk fractured off. Interesting! Started working my way across the slab, pounding the pointy end in every 30cm or so and splitting the slab up nicely. Turns out the construction was basically:
- layer of rocks, clearly sourced from the block itself
- layer of compacted sand ~50-100mm thick
- concrete slab ~30-40mm thick, and no rebar.
The last bit was the best discovery – whoever poured this thing used zero rebar (I mean, it was too thin for rebar anyway….), and that made the entire thing soooo much easier.
Aaaand then the cleanup.
- Steel sheets went to be recycled at the tip (most of them were way too rusted to be re-used)
- Timber, complete with many, many nails, went to my cousins for their fire pit – it makes me a bit sad to burn jarrah, but there’s no way to reprocess this stuff without a stupid amount of effort de-nailing it, and a lot of it was borderline rotten.
- Concrete bits, and the underlying rocks, were relocated to be reused for garden walls
- The remainder of the garbage that was in the shed went to the tip – thankfully I had a few unexpected helpers today to bring it all up to the front of the block and load the trailer.
I’m hoping the ATU guy will let me keep the posts at the end, and the line of bricks between them – I’ve always liked the idea of keeping markers as a history of how a block’s been used, instead of the modern practice of just bulldozing the lot and starting again. It’s also a nice challenge to reintegrate the ruins into the new use of the land, and I’ve already got a few ideas for these posts.
It might have been a pretty dodgy shed in the end, but it stood for a long time and served its owners (including me) well, and it’d be nice to keep the reminders.
