The demolition

The demolition was on Wednesday, July 8th. It was incredible! It's pretty crazy how easy and quick it is to destroy, and how hard and time-consuming to build! The excavator reminded me of a dinosaur, I'm not sure why! Within less than two hours, the house was just a pile of rubble!

As he was demolishing, the dude stopped all of a sudden. We weren't sure why, but then we saw him using the crane to remove a refrigerator from the house!


It was so exciting, we're finally starting!!!! All the planning and talking and now we are going to actually SEE results! It's so weird to think that there's no house there anymore... and I never even stepped inside! HaHa! I guess it's too late for that now :-)

It took a few days for the demolition to be complete. They had to clean up afterwards too. Here's our builder the day of the demolition:


And my husband and 8 month old son:

Demolition and building permits

Just as anything in this country, lots of paperwork and hoops to jump through to get to the actual building part. The anticipation can kill you!

Since we're demolishing, we also had to get a demolition permit. To get it, we had to talk to several utility companies to make sure their service was turned off at the property. That wasn't the hard part. We had to ask them to send a letter stating that their service was off. Sounds easy huh? Well, it wasn't. We had to talk with four companies - AT&T, DTE (Detroit Energy), CE (Consumer Energy), and Comcast. CE charged us several hundred dollars since we weren't customers of theirs. But it just took forever! AT&T had us directed from department to department, we kept having to call back and check up on the process...It finally worked though. Was a pain! We turned that all in.

We still haven't gotten the building permit. The guy at the city in charge of it only comes in on Mondays, so it's pretty inconvenient. To apply, we had to finalize the plans of the house...which I'll talk about in another post. Hopefully, we'll be getting the permit soon so we can start with the exciting part!

Once you get the demo permit you can demolish, but my brother wanted to wait until we had all the plans and blueprints ready. That way we can demolish then start building immediately after.
So the next step for us was making preliminary plans.