Down, out and gone by dinner.

Sheds fail from the bottom up

Almost every shed we take down failed the same way. Water got into the floor, the floor joists went soft, and then the wall plates sitting on them went too. From the outside it looks fine for years. Then a door stops closing, and by the time anyone investigates the whole back corner is composting quietly.

This matters practically, because a shed with a rotted floor is not stable to work inside or on top of. It is one of the genuine reasons not to do this yourself on a Saturday — the failure mode is a roof coming down while somebody is standing under it, and a structure that has looked solid for a decade can come apart faster than you can move.

We take them down panel by panel, from the top, with the sequence planned before anyone touches it.

What is usually inside

Everything. Sheds are where household objects go to be forgotten, and almost every one we open contains some combination of seized lawn mowers, bicycles with flat tyres, rusted hand tools, half-used bags of fertiliser, garden chemicals from a previous owner and a startling number of empty plant pots.

All of that comes with the teardown at no additional charge, which is worth flagging because some companies price the demolition and the contents as two jobs. It is one job. The only thing worth doing beforehand is walking through and pulling out anything you actually want.

The exception is the chemicals

Old paint, solvents, motor oil, fuel in a gas can, and pool or garden chemicals cannot go in our truck. That is a hard legal line rather than a preference — those materials require household hazardous waste handling, and mixing them into a general load contaminates the entire load.

Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William and Arlington all operate household hazardous waste drop-off sites, and all of them take residential quantities free of charge. It is one trip and it is genuinely easy. We will pull anything we find out and set it aside rather than loading it, but the day runs better if you flag it when you book.

Permits, honestly

For a standard residential storage shed sitting on a slab or on skids, you generally do not need a demolition permit anywhere in Northern Virginia. That covers the large majority of what we take down.

It changes when the structure is on a permanent foundation, exceeds the size threshold your jurisdiction sets, or has utilities run to it. Each of the four counties draws those lines slightly differently, and a detached garage is a different category of building entirely.

We will tell you if we think yours is near the line. It is one phone call to the county to confirm, it is free, and it is considerably better than having a stop-work order turn up with the roof already off.

Electrical

A surprising number of sheds have power run out to them — usually a buried line and a subpanel or a single circuit for a light and an outlet. Sometimes it was done properly with a permit. Frequently it was done by a previous owner on a weekend.

Either way, it needs a licensed electrician to disconnect and cap at the source before demolition starts. We will not cut a live line, and we will not assume a line is dead because someone thinks the breaker is off. Get it disconnected, then we take the structure down.

And the slab

Concrete pads underneath are optional and quoted separately, because concrete is disposed of by weight rather than volume. A typical 8x10 pad adds a few hundred dollars depending on thickness and reinforcement.

Plenty of people keep it. A shed slab makes a decent grill pad, a base for a basketball hoop, or a foundation for whatever replaces the shed. Leaving it costs you nothing, and there is no reason to remove concrete you might want in two years.