How to bid demolition work as a subcontractor

Start with what you are actually bidding

Demolition is priced on a boundary. Before you measure anything, decide which of these you are bidding, because they are three different businesses with three different insurance profiles:

• Selective demolition, 02 41 19. Interior removal of finishes, partitions, ceilings, casework and equipment inside a building that stays standing and often stays occupied.
• Structure demolition, 02 41 16. Taking a building or part of one down, with an engineered sequence, temporary support and protection of adjacent property.
• Selective site demolition, 02 41 13. Pavement, curb, walks, exterior slabs and site features. See site demolition for how that scope is measured, because it is usually a sitework package rather than yours.

Then draw the line that matters most. Hazardous material abatement is not demolition. Asbestos remediation and lead remediation are their own specification sections in Division 02, they are performed under separate licences and separate regulatory notifications, and unless your company holds those licences they are not in your number. Put it in the exclusions in plain words: no asbestos, lead, PCB, mold or contaminated material survey, abatement, handling, transportation or disposal is included.

Read Division 01 before you price disposal. Construction waste management and disposal, 01 74 19, is where the project's diversion requirement lives, and a required diversion percentage changes how you sort, how many containers you stage, and how much debris can leave as one mixed load. CSI MasterFormat numbering is how the GC compares your proposal against the spec, so name the sections you are covering.

Read the drawings for your sheets, and the two documents that are not drawings

Demolition is rarely drawn as a full set. You usually get a thin demo series, a hatch pattern and a keynote list, which means the drawings tell you less than you need.

• The demo plans. Architectural demolition sheets, civil demolition on the C series, and separate mechanical, electrical and plumbing demolition plans if the designer drew them at all.
• Keynotes beat hatch. The hatch shows roughly where. The keynotes say remove, remove and salvage, remove and reinstall, or protect in place, and those four phrases carry four different prices for the same object.
• The reflected ceiling plan. The reflected ceiling plan is your best guide to what sits above the tile, which is where most of the scope you did not price is hiding.
• Finish, door and hardware schedules. They tell you what the existing finishes actually are and which items the owner is likely to want back.
• Phasing and life safety plans. In an occupied building these set your work areas, your egress obligations and your hours.

The two documents that are not drawings decide whether you make money:

1. The hazardous materials survey report. If the bid documents do not include one, ask for it in writing before bid day. Pricing an existing building with no survey is pricing an unfunded stop-work order.
2. The as-built background under the demo plan. The architect drew the hatch on top of someone else's older drawing, and that background is frequently a previous tenant's set rather than anything field verified. A partition you priced as metal stud and gypsum board turns out to be CMU, plaster on clay tile, or a shear wall you are not allowed to touch.

That second one is the gotcha most demolition estimators learn the expensive way. If you cannot walk the building, state the wall construction you assumed, by name, and price anything different as a change.

Getting the quantities right

Demolition is bid in several units at once, and the conversions between them are where the money is:

• Finishes in square feet. Flooring, wall board, ceiling. A partition has two faces plus framing plus whatever is inside it.
• Walls, curb and sawcut in linear feet with the height noted. A wall to the underside of a nine foot ceiling and the same wall running to a deck fifteen feet up are not the same removal.
• Items by the each. Doors and frames, plumbing fixtures, casework, lighting, equipment, toilet accessories. These live in the keynotes, never in the hatch.
• Debris in cubic yards or tons, then in container pulls, which is the unit you actually pay in.

Run the chain all the way down: measured removal, in place volume, loose volume after swell, containers, tips. Broken material bulks up, and the swell factor you apply should come out of your own load counts on similar buildings rather than out of a book. Two container facts save real money. On concrete and masonry, weight fills a box long before volume does, so a large roll-off leaves part full and your load count runs well above what the volume math suggested. And in an occupied building, freight elevator availability caps debris production harder than crew size does.

Then price what the obvious takeoff misses. Above the ceiling grid you find abandoned conduit, dead ductwork, pipe hangers and decades of dead cable that nobody drew and no trade claims. Below, slab on grade sawcutting brings rebar, and in a post-tensioned slab it brings a hard stop: no cutting or coring until the slab is scanned and the tendon layout is confirmed. Scanning is a line item, not a courtesy.

The suspect materials that stop your work live in the boring places: spray applied fireproofing on the steel above the ceiling, duct and pipe insulation, and vinyl composition tile with its mastic. You are not abating any of it. You are pricing the fact that finding it puts your crew on standby.

The four boundaries that cost demolition subs money

1. Salvage versus disposal, and who owns the tipping fee. Remove and dispose, remove and salvage for the owner, and remove for reinstallation are three different prices. Salvage means careful removal, protection, palletizing and somewhere to store it. Confirm whether the GC's general conditions carry the containers. If you carry them, quote the tipping fee as a stated unit price per load, so an escalation or a rejected contaminated load becomes a change rather than an argument.
2. Temporary shoring and protection of what remains. Partial removal in a structure that stays up means shoring, and shoring means an engineer, a submittal and a sequence. State whether that design is yours or by others.
3. Cutting and capping versus disconnection by the trades. Your crew cannot open a live circuit, a gas line or a charged sprinkler main. Write that all systems within the demolition area will be de-energized, drained, purged, isolated and tagged by others before your work begins. Without that sentence you own the standby time.
4. Dust, noise, hours and access. In an occupied building, temporary dust partitions, negative air, floor and egress protection, restricted hours and a no impact tools rule during business hours are the job, not the fine print. Price the shift you were told to work, and name it.

What the GC checks when leveling demolition bids

Bid leveling is the GC normalizing every proposal to one common scope. On demolition, expect them to check whether abatement is in or out and whether you allowed standby if it is out, who supplies and pays for containers, hauling and tipping, what is salvaged and what is credited, shoring and protection, working hours and any shift premium, sawcutting and scanning, whether abandoned above ceiling material is in your scope or on a unit price, and every allowance you carried. Anything you left silent gets filled in with an assumption, and the assumption will not be the cheap reading.

Structure the proposal

Five parts, in this order. The number, with the specification sections it covers. Inclusions as items. Exclusions as items, which on demolition is the most valuable page in the document. Clarifications and assumptions: wall construction assumed, which survey you relied on, systems made safe by others, working hours, container ownership, elevator and laydown access. Then unit prices for the predictable adds, per container, per square foot of unforeseen finish, per hour of crew standby, per linear foot of sawcut, so the first surprise is a lookup instead of a negotiation.

Where this fits

Keep the takeoff that produced the quantities, because the leveling call is won by the sub who can open it and show which sheet a number came from. If you are running the takeoff itself, Ruh reads the drawing set, measures the scope, and prices the measured quantities against your own price book, with every line traceable back to the sheet it came from.