Demolition at home

Thickness settles nothing. You look at the drawings, at how walls stack from one floor to the next, at the direction of the joists, at the sound under a mallet. In doubt — which is common in older buildings in Nice — it is a visit on site that answers, not a forum.

Electricity, water, gas, ventilation: all of it crosses walls without warning. You switch the circuits off at the consumer unit, close the valves, scan, and cut inspection openings. A neighbour's cables may well pass through your partition: that is common in older buildings.

Tile adhesives, floor tiles, renders, ducts: asbestos hides in ordinary materials from before July 1997. The survey before works is compulsory as soon as a company is involved. Lead concerns paints from before 1949. Both are measured in a laboratory.

Anything touching the structure, the façade, a soil stack or a ventilation duct belongs to the common parts: authorisation from the general meeting is required. The file has to be prepared, and the meeting is held once a year, or as an extraordinary session. Count in months, not weekends.

The job starts downstairs. Hall floor covered, stair nosings protected, lift car lined with cardboard. Half a day that spares you most of the complaints — and it is what the neighbours will see of your works before they hear the noise.

Floors sheeted and boarded over in the circulation routes, doors of the untouched rooms taped shut, ventilation ducts blocked off. An airlock of plastic film at the entrance changes everything. Otherwise plaster dust gets everywhere: hinges, switches, appliances.

Everything that can be unscrewed comes off before the sledgehammer appears: doors, cupboards, sanitaryware, radiators, wall tiles, skirtings. The soft strip is long, repetitive and unglamorous, but it sorts the waste at source. It is often half the total time.

You break from the top down, in sections, keeping the routes clear. A plasterboard partition comes apart almost cleanly; plaster blocks go with a hammer and a sledge. Damp them down lightly and take the rubble out as you go.

Here you demolish nothing yourself. A structural engineer calculates the span, the lintel or the steel beam, the bearings and the propping. In a co-owned building, that note feeds the file for the general meeting. Your part: the measurements and the wait, several weeks of it.

Bags of 25 kg maximum, otherwise they tear in the stairwell. You go down in small runs, load up and sort: inert waste, wood, metal, plaster. The recycling centre limits the volume a private individual may bring, and a skip on the public highway needs a permit.

A demolished partition always leaves a mark: a strip of untiled floor, a scar on the ceiling, a plaster joint on the walls either side, a skirting that stops short. These repairs are not demolition, but they are born of it — and they are counted in days.

Plaster dust does not vacuum up in one go: it settles again. Several passes with a fine-filter vacuum, a few days apart, before you skim or paint. Otherwise the first coat grips badly, and it shows.