Demolition Contractors Minneapolis MN: Teardowns and Removals Around Edina

How a residential demolition job unfolds in the west metro

Every demolition job here starts on foot, not in a machine. Someone walks the property, studies what is coming down and what has to survive, and works out how a truck and an excavator will get in. A rambler on a wide Edina lot with an open driveway is a very different job from a story-and-a-half wedged between neighbors on a narrow city lot where the only way in is the alley.

After the walk-through comes paperwork and preparation, and on most teardowns that stretch lasts longer than the demolition itself. The building gets an asbestos inspection. Anything the inspector flags is taken out by an abatement specialist before a machine touches the structure. Gas, electric, water and sewer are shut off and capped through the utility companies and the city. The demolition permit is pulled. Trees the city wants kept get fenced off, and silt fence or similar erosion control goes up along the low side of the lot.

The teardown itself often moves faster than people expect. An excavator pulls the structure down into its own basement hole in sections, sorting as it goes: broken concrete and brick in one pile, metal in another, wood and mixed debris loaded into trucks or roll-off containers. Next the foundation walls and slab are removed or broken up, clean fill goes back in successive compacted layers, and the final grade is set to shed rain toward the street instead of the house next door. The full sequence for a whole house is laid out step by step on the house demolition page.

What the ground under Edina and Minneapolis does to a demolition

Glaciers left most of Hennepin County sitting on till, a dense mix of clay, silt, sand and stones that holds water and swells when it freezes. Scattered through it are sandy pockets that drain quickly and clay seams that barely drain at all, sometimes within a few yards of each other on the same lot. A contractor who has dug around here expects that variety and plans the fill with it in mind.

That matters most after the structure is gone. A basement hole backfilled with the wrong material, or with decent material dumped in all at once, can keep settling for years. Wet clay shoved back into a hole and left loose tends to sink unevenly, leaving a soft spot right where a new foundation, driveway or patio is supposed to go. Good backfill is placed in lifts and compacted as it rises, and on a lot headed for a new house the builder usually has firm opinions about what goes in the hole and how it is tested.

Water is the other local variable. Lots near Minnehaha Creek, Nine Mile Creek, the lakes or any of the wetlands that dot the southwest suburbs can sit close to the water table. A basement floor broken out in April may fill with groundwater before anyone gets back to it. Near the water, the watershed district and state shoreland rules can also shape how much ground gets disturbed and how the site has to be stabilized afterward.

Then there is frost. Minnesota winters drive frost deep into the ground, and frozen soil is slow to dig, nearly impossible to compact properly and a poor thing to bury in a backfill. Most careful contractors will not push frozen chunks back into a hole, and a lot finished in the dead of winter usually needs some regrading once it thaws out.

The houses, garages and lots that come down here

A large share of the teardowns around Edina involve postwar houses: one-story ramblers and story-and-a-halfs put up in the years after the war on lots that now look generous next to the modest house sitting on them. Buyers purchase them for the land, take the old house down and build something larger, sometimes on the old footprint and often on a bigger one. Nearly all of them stand over a full basement of poured concrete or concrete block, and that basement is one of the biggest pieces of the job.

Inside Minneapolis the picture shifts. Houses are often older, lots are narrower, and many blocks have alleys with a detached garage at the back of each lot. Plenty of those garages are leaning, rotted at the sill or too small for anything built in the last few decades, and owners replace them long before they think about the house. Reaching a garage off an alley is a different problem from reaching one beside a suburban driveway, and the garage and shed demolition page covers both situations.

In the newer suburbs to the southwest, requests lean toward pieces of a property rather than whole houses: a backyard pool installed a generation ago, a deck that is past saving, a cracked and tilted driveway, or a finished basement that needs to go back to bare walls. Mature trees are common everywhere in the west metro, and cities increasingly expect them to be protected during construction rather than written off as collateral damage.

Construction type changes the work as much as size does. A wood-framed rambler with lap siding and an asphalt roof comes apart and sorts fairly easily. A brick-veneer house adds heavy rubble that has to be separated from the framing, and a house with plaster walls on wood lath produces far more weight per room than one finished in drywall. Additions built decades apart, with a slab under one wing and a basement under the rest, mean the foundation work is really two jobs on one lot. Split-levels and walkouts, common on the hillier ground west of Highway 100, put part of the basement above grade, which changes how the walls come out and how the slope gets rebuilt.

Choosing the right kind of demolition for your project

Most people arrive knowing what they want gone but not quite what to call it. Here is the short version of how the work divides up.

• The whole house is coming down. That is a full teardown, covering the basement, utilities, permits and a backfilled, graded lot. Start with house demolition.
• Only an outbuilding is going. Detached garages, sheds, carports, decks and gazebos fall under garage and shed demolition, which usually means a smaller permit and a much shorter job.
• The pool is the problem. Filling it in place or hauling the shell away is a real decision, with consequences for resale and for what you can build on that spot later. Read pool removal before you choose.
• The house stays but the inside is changing. Kitchen and bath gut-outs, basement tear-outs and wall removals are interior demolition, where protecting the rooms that stay is half the work.
• The concrete has failed. Heaved driveways, sunken patios, crumbling front steps and old slabs come out under concrete removal, usually ahead of a new pour.

Plenty of projects combine two or more of these. A teardown on a lot with a backyard pool, or a garage replacement that also takes out the cracked apron in front of it, is a common pairing. Saying so at the start lets one contractor price the whole thing and sequence it so the same machine and the same trucks handle everything during a single mobilization.

Permits, asbestos checks and utility shutoffs in general terms

Every city in the metro issues its own demolition permit, and they do not all ask for the same things. Commonly the city wants proof that utilities have been disconnected, that the asbestos survey is complete and that the sewer line will be capped where an inspector can see it. Suburbs where teardown-and-rebuild has become routine, Edina among them, often layer on more: notice to the neighbors, construction-management expectations about work hours, parking and dust, and a plan for protecting trees. Your city's building department is the authority on exactly what it requires.

Minnesota and federal regulations typically require an asbestos survey ahead of any teardown, and the state pollution control agency usually expects a demolition notice before work starts. If the inspector finds asbestos in pipe wrap, old floor tile, ceiling texture or siding, an abatement specialist removes it before the teardown begins. Paint in older houses may contain lead, which affects how some interior work and debris handling are done. None of this is optional, and none of it can be settled by a website; it gets worked out property by property.

Utilities follow their own sequence. Gas and electric are disconnected by the utility companies, water is shut off at the street, and the sewer is cut and capped, often with a city inspection of the cap before anything is buried. Before any digging, Gopher State One Call is the free service that gets underground lines marked so the excavator does not discover them the hard way. Lots near lakes, creeks and wetlands can bring the watershed district and shoreland rules into the picture, and a homeowner association may have its own say about hours, access and what the finished lot should look like.

What a complete demolition proposal should spell out

Two teardown bids may seem nearly identical at a glance while covering very different work. A proposal worth signing answers the questions that otherwise turn into arguments halfway through the job. Look for these points in writing:

• Exactly what is being removed and what stays, from the house and garage down to the driveway, the trees and the retaining wall at the back.
• Who handles the asbestos survey and any abatement, and whether that work is inside the number or billed separately.
• Who arranges the utility disconnects and the sewer cap, and who pulls the demolition permit.
• What happens to the basement: walls and floor broken out and hauled away, or the floor broken for drainage and the hole filled.
• What fill goes back in, how it is compacted and what the final grade will look like.
• Erosion control, tree protection and how the neighbors' property and the street will be protected.
• The destination for each kind of debris: which loads get recycled and which are hauled off to be landfilled.
• What is excluded, such as seed or sod, curb and apron repair, or charges the utility companies bill on their own.

On cost, there is no honest flat figure for demolition anywhere in the metro, because the drivers swing so widely from one lot to the next. Size and construction type matter. So does the foundation, how close the machine can get, whether asbestos turns up, how much material can be recycled rather than landfilled, how much utility work is involved, how much fill the hole swallows and what the permits demand. A contractor sets the figure only after walking the site, and an itemized bid covering each of these points beats a lone total scribbled on a card when you are weighing offers.

When in the year demolition goes smoothest here

Demolition can happen in most months, but the calendar changes how it goes. Spring brings seasonal road load limits that slow or restrict heavy trucks on some roads while the ground thaws, which can affect when an excavator is delivered and how heavily the dump trucks are loaded. Spring is also the wettest stretch for basements that sit near the water.

Summer and early fall are the easiest window for most jobs. The ground is workable, fill compacts the way it should, and there is still time for seed or sod to root before the cold returns. That short establishment window is worth planning around: a lot finished in late October may sit as bare dirt behind erosion control until the following spring.

Winter teardowns do happen, especially when a builder wants the lot cleared for an early spring start. Frozen ground slows excavation and complicates backfill, and the final grade often has to be touched up after the thaw. Booking the walk-through and the asbestos inspection during the winter, then scheduling the machine work for when the ground opens up, is a common way to keep a spring building project on track.

Smaller jobs bend more easily around the weather. A shed or a deck can come down on a dry winter day, and interior work goes on regardless of what the ground is doing outside. Concrete breaking is possible in cold weather too, though the new pour that follows it waits for warmer conditions.

Communities covered across the west metro

Edina sits at the center of this site, but requests come from every direction along I-494, Highway 62, Highway 100 and I-394. The four communities below each have a page describing their lots, soils, housing and permit posture. Richfield, St. Louis Park and Hopkins fall inside the same service area, and requests from anywhere nearby are welcome.

The city brings tight lots, alleys and older houses, all described on the Minneapolis demolition page. Minnetonka adds wooded slopes and shoreland around Lake Minnetonka. Eden Prairie leans toward newer subdivisions with walkout basements, pools and decks, and Bloomington is a big postwar suburb whose southern edge drops toward the Minnesota River.

How this site works and what to send

Edina Demolition is not a demolition company. It is a website that connects property owners in Edina and the west metro with a demolition contractor who works this area. That contractor sets the scope, schedule and cost after seeing the property, and you deal with them directly from there.

The quickest way to a useful answer is to send the property address, a short description of what you want removed and a handful of photos: the structure from each side, the route a truck would take, the basement if there is one, and anything that needs to stay. The contact page explains what helps most, or you can use the form below.

Common questions about demolition in Edina and the Twin Cities

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Tell us the address and what is coming down, and a west metro demolition contractor will follow up.