April 15, 2010

JMX CONTRACTING INC.

95 per cent of the timber in the building’s front retail section will be removed.

FOCUS | Demolition & environmental engineering

Disassembly of Ontario mill designed to capture green credit for new building

PETER KENTER

correspondent

The old Co-op feed mill building has stood in the township of Uxbridge for so long that most people can’t recall just when it was built. Abandoned for about a dozen years, the building has been demolished to make way for the new offices of First Leaside Securities.

A demolition tender was issued by the developer to “deconstruct” the building in such a manner as to completely recycle the building’s components as part of a plan for LEED certification of the new development. A special clause in the contract required the demolition contractor to effectively dismantle as much of the reusable structural timber as possible, to be incorporated into construction of the office building.

The demolition contract was awarded to JMX Contracting Inc. of Gormley, Ont. JMX president John McCrossan sealed the deal with a guarantee to remove 95 per cent of the timber in the building’s front retail section, enough to satisfy the architectural requirements of the new building.

The job began with asbestos abatement before the demolition phase began.

“I’ve lived in Uxbridge most of my life,” says JMX co-owner Jeff Norton. “We needed to use a good operator who could dismantle those beams without smashing them into toothpicks. John’s been in the business for 35 years and I’ve got two guys who could have handled the job as well as I can. But this is my home town, and when it comes to taking down a local landmark, you couldn’t convince me to give that job to anybody else.”

Although some local historians estimate the construction date of the building in the 1950s, Norton reckons parts of it are decades older. The structural timbers were erected using mortise and tenon joints fixed with pegs, a construction method that was phased out in the 1940s.

“We pre-cut parts of the building and removed the bracing, then we had to remove the pegs by hand,” says Norton.

JMX CONTRACTING INC.

A high-reach excavator — run by a veteran JMX operator — was used to remove the boards and timbers.

“We then carefully used the high reach excavator to pull out the boards and timbers, which were mostly sawn pine and hemlock. The owners got what they wanted — beams, posts, timbers, gussets — the whole ball of wax.”

The building was constructed in three sections, with a retail section at the front, a silage storage area in the centre and silos in the rear. Once the retail section came down, the silage and silo sections were quickly demolished.

Norton says some of the boards he removed from the structure were up to 10 metres long and up to a metre wide. The boards were de-nailed on site, loaded on a float, then delivered to a First Leaside storage building for later use. Local artisan shop Gilldercroft Furniture of Sandford, Ont. will be incorporating some of the reclaimed wood into a massive five-metre boardroom table.

All of the steel removed from the building, including old conveyers and catwalks, was recycled. All of the concrete from the pre-cast concrete silos at the rear of the facility will be crushed and used on-site as backfill.

The demolition had been scheduled for months as the developer waited for the township to finalize its Community Improvement Plan. Approval was also required from Go Transit, which owns a rail line running past the site, and from the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority which has jurisdiction over a catch basin on the east side of the site that discharges into a nearby waterway.

After the building was thoroughly dismantled, Norton handed over the project to McCrossan who is overseeing site soil remediation.

“The demolition really brought out the crowds,” says Norton. “Especially neighbours of the building. We were becoming so familiar with a few of the residents that when we went out to buy coffee, we’d bring in an order for them as well.”

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