Renovating a Pre-1950 Concord Home: A Debris Planning Guide

Concord has a lot of nineteenth and early twentieth century housing, and it is the reason our sizing advice differs from what you will read on a national website. Renovating one of these homes is a genuinely different exercise from renovating a house built in 1995, and the debris is where most of the surprises live.

Why old houses are a different job

Walk into a house built in 1908 in the South End, or one of the mill-era properties in Penacook or up in Northfield, and almost every material in it behaves differently to its modern equivalent.

Walls are plaster over wood lath rather than gypsum board. Sheathing is board rather than plywood or OSB. Framing is full-dimension, so a two-by-four is genuinely two inches by four. Floors are often multiple layers deep, with the original boards buried under linoleum, plywood underlayment and a later hardwood or laminate. Insulation may be nothing at all, or it may be something surprising.

All of which means more weight, more dust, more layers to remove and more decisions to make about what is worth keeping.

What actually comes out of the walls

Plaster and lath

The dominant material by weight. Plaster is essentially a thin layer of stone, applied in three coats over thin wood strips nailed across the studs. Taking down a single room's walls and ceiling produces a startling volume of it, and it settles densely in a container.

Layered flooring

Rarely one thing. Expect to find two, three or four layers, potentially including linoleum with a felt backing, plywood or particleboard underlayment, and the original board floor. Each layer needs removing and each adds weight.

Old windows

Wood sash windows with counterweights. The weights themselves are cast iron and worth separating for scrap. The glass and frames go in the container.

Knob-and-tube wiring and old plumbing

Copper and brass have real scrap value and should not be buried in a mixed load. Cast iron waste stack is extremely heavy and worth pulling separately.

Chimney and masonry

Central chimneys were standard. Taking one down produces brick and mortar that belongs in a dedicated heavy-debris container, not mixed with the general demolition.

Weight, and why the container looks empty

This is the practical heart of it. Plaster-and-lath demolition debris runs roughly 1,200 to 1,600 pounds per cubic yard once settled. Ordinary mixed renovation debris from a modern house runs perhaps 300 to 500.

Put that in real terms. A 20 yard container has a tonnage allowance in the region of 3 to 4 tons. Filled with modern debris it will comfortably stay inside that. Filled with plaster and lath, you will hit four tons at roughly the halfway mark up the walls.

So when a customer calls us from a 1910 house and asks for a 30 yard, the honest answer is almost always that they want a 15 or a 20, and possibly two of them in sequence. We have this conversation several times a week and it never stops feeling counterintuitive to the person on the other end of the phone. It is nonetheless correct. Read our sizing guide for the full logic.

Lead paint and what it changes

Lead-based paint was in general use in American homes until it was banned for residential use in 1978. In practice, essentially every Concord home built before about 1950 has lead paint somewhere, usually under later layers on trim, windows, doors and exterior siding.

Intact lead paint on a surface you are not disturbing is generally low risk. The hazard is created by disturbance: sanding, scraping, demolition and the dust that comes with them.

If you are hiring a contractor for work that disturbs painted surfaces in a pre-1978 home, the EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting rule requires the firm to be certified and to follow specific containment, work-practice and cleanup requirements. This is not optional and it is worth confirming before you hire. Homeowners doing their own work in their own home are not covered by the rule, but the dust behaves identically regardless of who created it, and the precautions are worth taking anyway.

For disposal, ordinary demolition debris with lead paint on it is generally handled as construction and demolition waste rather than as hazardous waste. Tell us it is a pre-1978 property when you book so the load is described accurately.

Asbestos: the one to stop for

Everything else in this article is a planning problem. Asbestos is a stop-work problem.

Look for it in pipe and boiler insulation, particularly the corrugated or wrapped material around old steam and hot water pipes; in nine-inch floor tiles and their black mastic; in some sheet flooring backings; in older siding shingles; in textured ceiling coatings; and in some joint compounds.

If you suspect asbestos, do not disturb it and do not put it in a container. It requires testing and, where confirmed, abatement by a licensed contractor with specific handling and documentation. New Hampshire regulates this through NHDES and the requirements exist for good reason.

Testing is cheap relative to the alternative. A suspect material sample sent to a lab is a modest cost and a day or two of waiting. Removing asbestos improperly is a health hazard and a serious regulatory problem.

Sorting for salvage before you demolish

Older Concord homes contain material with genuine value, and once it is in the container that value is gone.

• Wide-board flooring and old-growth lumber. Genuinely valuable if removed with care.
• Period hardware. Mortise locks, hinges, doorknobs, sash hardware. Small, easily removed and sought after.
• Doors and mouldings. Five-panel doors and original trim profiles are worth more than any replacement you would buy.
• Cast iron. Radiators, tubs, window weights, waste stack. Heavy enough that removing it from the load meaningfully changes the tonnage.
• Copper and brass. Worth money at any scrap yard.
• Brick. Reclaimed brick from a chimney sells if it is cleaned.

An afternoon spent pulling this material out before demolition frequently pays for the container.

A realistic container plan

For a substantial renovation of a pre-1950 Concord home, plan in phases rather than ordering one container and hoping.

1. Clear-out phase. Contents, furniture, stored material. Bulky and light. A 20 or 30 yard.
2. Demolition phase. Plaster, lath, flooring, old fixtures. Dense and heavy. A 15 or 20 yard, likely swapped once or twice.
3. Masonry, if any. Chimney or foundation work. A separate 10 yard for clean fill.
4. Build-out phase. Packaging, offcuts, cardboard. Bulky and light again. A 20 or 30 yard.

Tell us the whole sequence when you first call and we can plan the deliveries around your trades rather than reacting to them. That is the difference between a container that helps the job and one that gets in the way of it. Our construction service page covers how we schedule swaps.