A buddy of mine bought a small brick building that used to be a local credit union branch back in the day, and we spent the afternoon trying to gut the main vault area to turn it into a secure filing office. The heavy vault door itself was already unbolted and removed by the previous owners, so the room was just an empty square box. I thought removing the old safety deposit box steel racks from the back wall would be a simple case of unbolting some brackets with a socket set. What a ridiculous assumption.
The biggest issue right away was how the steel storage cages were fastened to the masonry. The installers hadn’t just used regular wall anchors; they had literally welded the thick iron support beams directly to structural steel plates embedded deep inside the eight inch reinforced concrete walls. Every single time I tried to put weight on the breaker bar, the bolt heads would just shear off completely, leaving the heavy iron brackets still fused solid to the cement. I had to go track down a heavy rescue saw with a diamond grit blade just to cut the vertical steel pillars down inch by inch while a massive cloud of burning iron smell filled the tiny room.
Then came the absolute nightmare of trying to trace the old security alarm conduit lines that ran through the ceiling slab. The thick copper wires were wrapped inside an incredibly rigid, zinc coated iron pipe that was completely embedded right in the middle of the poured concrete overhead. Trying to cut through the pipe with a basic hacksaw did absolutely nothing except dull the blade teeth within five minutes. I spent an hour squeezed on top of a step stool with a heavy sledgehammer, aggressively chipping away at the loose ceiling plaster just to find a seam where the conduit line coupled together so I could pry it out with a crowbar.
The main metal racks are finally chopped down into scrap pieces now and stacked up out by the alley fence. The back wall of the concrete room is completely covered in deep, black burn marks from the saw blade sparks, and the old ventilation duct in the corner is blowing a steady stream of cold, dusty cellar air straight into the hallway.