Front Porch Demolition: The Prequel

He says:

The house came equipped with a slab.  No, we don't really know why, it was apparently someone's idea of a front porch, but why you would build one like this is beyond us.  It was a giant concrete block.  It must have been terribly expensive to do like this, and it had the fantastic feature of sloping toward the house...so all the water it collected sat against the front of the house.  Wonderful.

She Says:

In addition, our homeowner's insurance agent took one look at this thing and said, "No Way."  He insisted that the "porch" had to have a railing.  Now we had no intention of keeping this thing, let alone spending time and money putting a railing on it (how would you even do that anyway?  Talk about putting lipstick on a pig!)  So we halted progress inside and turned our attention to The Slab.

He Says:

In the above photo, I have removed the steps from the front and we're ready to demolish it.  Demo on this, however, is no small matter.  Being made of 4-6" thick aged concrete with rebar, we needed a very large tool.  Enter the skid loader.

A skid loader is a utility tractor that has many types of interchangeable implements that are carried on articulated arms in front.  For this job, we needed a power jackhammer and a scooper bucket.  A trip to the rental company, $300, and we had it for 24 hours.

We broke the slab into little pieces and scooped them into a pile at the edge of the yard.  It made a big pile.  It took about 6 hours of steady work to fully remove the slab, but when we were done, we had room for a new (proper) porch and we could start to repair the water damage the slab had caused.

Next step - design and build a front porch.