Tips for When a House is Being Torn Down

I went to a house in my neighborhood which is being torn down.

There is an excavator on the site, but no heavy metal dumpster as yet. The house is about 70% demolished.

I walked onto the site and quickly picked up about $3-5 of copper and bare bright copper. I stood at the perimeter of the pile only and didn’t walk on anything as I could have easily stepped on a nail or something. They said I could take what I had, but that was it.

I couldn’t help but think there was easily $150-250 of copper in that roughly 3,000 sqft. house in an upscale neighborhood.

I suspect that if I call the number on the sign out front, it will be really easy for the person to just say “No, it is too dangerous to enter active construction sites.”

Does anyone have any tips or ideas to get more from each house?

I think you understand well enough. A construction site is not the place to be. They've got big things going on. Thousands of dollars per hour are being spent when things are in operation. You are under foot and making a nuisance of yourself by chasing pennies around the jobsite. You are actually costing them money by being in the way and slowing things down.

I get that where i work too. I try to be good to people and let them do their thing but there are times when i have to run the scrappers off. It's hard to find the words to explain other than to say some of the scrappers put themselves in dangerous situations. There's little or no situational awareness on their part.

* The thing to do would be to somehow scrap the building before the demolition begins. Even that would have it's liability issues but if you knew the people, and they trusted you not to hurt yourself, they might allow it.

You gotta bear in mind though ... a couple of hundred bucks in wasted scrap value sent off to the landfill is meaningless on a $ 600,000.00 construction project. A few hundred might seem like a lot of money to you but it's nothing to them.

* Another way you might go at it is by developing good social contacts with people in the trades. Friends help friends. You do for them. They do for you. If they know you're into scrapping ... they will sometimes help you along your way. Maybe they throw you a bone every so often. It all adds up. *