Slab Demolition & Site Prep — Renwick

Subdivided Section — Garage Slab to House Pad

This job was on a subdivided section in Renwick, where an existing garage slab was sitting right where the new house needed to go. The client needed the old concrete gone and the ground brought up to the surveyor's heights, ready for the new slab to be poured. DirtPro took the site from "garage in the way" through to "ready for the concrete crew" in a single mobilisation — demolition, cartage, sub-grade, topsoil strip and gravel pad all handled by the one team.

The first job was the slab itself. The existing garage floor was broken up with the 14-tonne Hitachi, the concrete loaded straight into the Isuzu tipper and carted off. Once the slab was gone we moved into the earthworks. The new house footprint was sub-graded to a clean, level base — pulling out the soft material so the gravel pad sits on solid, undisturbed ground rather than spongy topsoil.

With the cut done, the excess topsoil was stripped from the building area and carted away separately so it didn't get mixed in with the structural fill. Then we brought the pad back up to the given heights with imported gravel, compacted in layers so the surface is flat, level and consistent across the footprint. By the time we pulled off site, the concrete crew could roll straight in and start boxing for the new slab — no second contractor, no waiting around, no surprises about levels.

This is a pretty common pattern on subdivided sections around Renwick. The original outbuildings rarely sit exactly where the new house wants to go, and getting demolition and site prep done as a single package saves the client real money compared to splitting the work across multiple contractors.

Recycling the Concrete, Not Dumping It

The broken-up slab didn't go to landfill. We have an arrangement with a local sub-contractor who takes clean demolition concrete, crushes it, and re-uses it as base course aggregate — at a fraction of standard transfer station fees for construction waste. On a typical garage slab the saving runs into the thousands, and the material gets a second life instead of being buried in a hole in the ground.

It's the same approach we take on bigger jobs — see our demolition and concrete breaking page for the wider picture. Recycling the concrete is the default on every DirtPro demolition job where the material is clean.

Lime Tree Transplant

One of the extras on this job: there was a healthy mature lime tree sitting in the wrong spot. Rather than push it into a burn pile, we dug it out carefully — preserving as much of the root ball as possible — and replanted it in a new position elsewhere on the property. I went back to the site recently and the tree is still alive and going well. Not strictly civil contracting, but if a tree can be saved with twenty minutes of careful digger work, it's worth doing.

Why Renwick?

Renwick sits in the heart of Marlborough wine country, and the village itself has seen steady subdivision and infill development over the last few years. Lifestyle blocks, vineyard cottages, and small subdivided sections all need site work before the builders arrive. We're based 10 minutes down the road in Fairhall, so getting to Renwick jobs is quick and cartage trips stay short — which keeps costs down for the client.