Home » The Great Elevator Demolition Fiasco

I have begun to work on the north side of my house. The tarp is slowly getting rolled up the wall as I replace studs and begin to nail clapboard in place over the old framing. The project will take a while. The gap on the sidewall is six feet wide by 22 feet high. It was produced when I tore the elevator off of my house last year.

 

I imagine this requires an explanation. I live in an old three-story Victorian home that was built in the early 1900s. The owner, who was infirmed, had an elevator installed that went from the first floor foyer to the second floor landing to make things easier for him to get up and down. The elevator was added to the north side of the house and except for the two normal oak doors that close off the machine, has no appearance on the regular living area of the home.

When we moved into this house in 1984, the elevator still worked but I was fearful of using it. You could see that there had been several water leaks over the years as the added structure had a flat roof and there are only two kinds of flat roofs; those that leak and those that are going to leak. Anyway I decided to cut power to the elevator and just ignore it until it required I do something drastic. Something drastic that ended up being a comedy.

Eventually the structure started pulling away from the house and began to sag. The rains and weather had continued to damage the structure as I continued to ignore it. As it was twenty-two-feet tall, I knew I just couldn't let it pull away and fall as my neighbor's house is eighteen feet away from the elevator and my math told me this could be a real problem.

I was going to dismantle the thing myself except, like a real elevator, it had a huge, heavy counter-weight inside that I judged to be about six-hundred pounds and I had no way of making sure it didn't come crashing down on me when I began the teardown.

Enter the demolition team. I had a friend who takes down trees and hired him and his bucket truck to help drop the structure on my property without banging it off the neighbor's or my house. I pictured him slowly bringing it down in pieces and then we would chain the counterweight to the bucket and slowly lower it down. That didn't happen.

I knew things weren't going good when my friend in the bucket started banging on the roof of the add-on with a heavy sledge. I was about to suggest we work on demolition piecemeal when he yelled out, "Here it comes."

With that, the entire elevator started coming at me. Moving deftly out of the way I saw it swing to the north, almost knock the bucket truck over and then crash diagonally on my property and the neighbor's cyclone fence which was now only six inches tall. Amazingly, the reason it had swung was because the electrical wire that I had years ago shut off, but not removed, had held the monstrous hunk of wood and iron and prevented the elevator from creating a new picture window in the next door neighbor's kitchen area.

Immediately I thought of the movie, "The Money Pit". That's the movie where all of a sudden the electrical wiring gets pulled and the entire house is shown having the wiring yanked out of the plaster as Tom Hanks stands by in horror. I pictured the same happening to the inside of my home but I had other worries to contend with first. I had an elevator down on a fence with no way to move it.

I drove off to find another friend who ran a welding and torch business and finding him pleaded that I had an emergency. He came and after an hour of torching the huge weight into pieces we finally could use the bucket truck to lift the remaining wood off my neighbor's fence and onto my property. It was only then that I walked in the house and hit my knees when I saw all my wiring was still in the walls where it should be.

The rest of the story is pretty mundane. We chopped up the wood for hauling. The welder gratefully took the heavy cast for various projects and several junkers came by to pick up the scrap metal. By nightfall all that was left were a few scraps of wood and a fence that wouldn't keep a munchkin in or out.

Again with good fortune looking my way, I was advised the fence was never liked by my neighbors on that side of their property anyway and they intended to haul it away and keep the area between us open.

Well that's how this all happened. It is why for almost a year the old house I live in had a blue tarp nailed to the side of the house. I am thinking that when I get repair work done up to the second floor that I leave the door that now leads to open sky right where it is. I can just see cars driving by seeing a door, twenty-feet in the air with no stairway and wondering what in the hell that is all about. I will tell this story for those who care to stop.