How Not To Demolish A Lean To

Almost every renovator, builder and developer I know suffers from the same disease.It’s a disease which is hard to break. It goes like this. You spend your life making homes beautiful for others to live in because you love what you do, but you end up living in an unrenovated wreck yourself, as your own home renovation gets put on the back burner. Yes, all you developers, I can see you nodding as you read this.

I’ve spent my life living in wrecks that needed renovation, I’m convinced it’s a form of madness passed down from my builder dad.

And lets face it, we can’t just go off and buy a house that’s been ‘done up’ already, because we need to adhere to the cardinal rule that property must always be bought at bargain bucket prices so as to add value for eventual re-sale. I can’t help seeing property as investment, even those I live in.

These last few weeks I have been hacking my own home to bits (at last), as I have finally got around to renovating where I live. Phew it’s been hectic.

Green Building Techniques

Yesterday was particularly fun. I have a very ugly ‘lean to’ conservatory attached to the side of my property. ( It’s long been a source of embarrassment!) It was created by a very artistic person who was obviously into green building techniques, because its’ made from cobbled together bits of scrap wood, random bits of metal, bits of plastic, an aluminium door, a wooden door and various fencing parts! The previous owner must have spent months raiding skips for this creation.

It’s A Grand Design

This design puts me in mind of that Grand Designs boat project made from scrap metal ( which ended up back as scrap metal and beached in Southend because it was so ugly no sane person would give it mooring room!) Try imaging my own lovely creation sloshed with white and yellow paint and you are half way there. Lovely.

Yesterday was D-Day. The lean-to was gonna get it. In true builder style, no protective clothing was used for this purpose

* disclaimer: please wear protective clothing when attempting demolition or you may end up looking very glamorous with scraped knuckles, spiders in your hair and covered in filth from head to foot.* ( No amount of cajoling will tempt me to tweet THAT sight!)

The random cobbled together nature of this particular eyesore ( the lean-to, not me) meant that if you huffed and puffed parts would just fall down, whilst other parts required considerable yanking at and swearing to get loose.

A Well Placed Crow Bar

A couple of hours with a crow bar, hammer and power screw driver and its all but gone. The spiders were given eviction notices and have packed up and moved house. All that’s left now is a massive pile of wood, metal,plastic and a myriad of other items to try and find a use for. Because that’s another renovators fault…..where some folks see a pile of wood, I see garden planters, bird tables…..

Now that my glamorous image is in tatters, I’m off to ‘phone a friend’ to help me move all the debris to the local dump, where I will smile prettily and ask the lovely chaps down there to lift the heavy stuff into the bins. Bob the builder over and out.