Neighbours, Boundary Walls and Street Trees

Your demolition happens on your land. Its consequences do not stop at the title boundary, and the obligations that follow from that are where unprepared owners get hurt.

Protection work notices

Where demolition or building work may affect an adjoining property, the Building Act requires the owner to serve protection work notices on the adjoining owner, setting out what protection work is proposed. The adjoining owner can agree, disagree, or require further information, and the building surveyor determines the matter if it is not resolved.

This applies more often than people expect: shared walls, close boundaries, excavation near a neighbour's footings, or removing a structure that has been providing lateral support.

It has a process and a timeline. Discovering it after you had planned to start is a delay measured in weeks — and starting without it, where it was required, is a serious problem rather than a technicality.

Party and boundary walls

A wall shared with a neighbour is the fussiest part of any attached demolition. The work involves:

- Establishing what is actually shared, structurally, before anything is cut - Temporary propping while load paths change - A clean, agreed cut line - Weatherproof make-good on the exposed face — the same day it is opened up - Documented condition of the neighbour's side before work starts

That last item is the one people skip and later wish they had not. Photograph the neighbour's wall, ceilings and any existing cracking before the job begins. Without it, every pre-existing crack in that house becomes your demolition's fault, and you have no way to demonstrate otherwise.

Street trees and the nature strip

Councils treat nature strip trees as assets with real value, and the penalties for damaging one are not trivial. Melbourne councils typically require an asset protection permit covering the crossover, footpath, kerb and any street tree, and often a tree protection plan setting out fencing, ground protection and exclusion zones.

Practical rules: do not stockpile material under a canopy, do not park plant inside a marked protection zone, and do not let a truck take a branch off on the way in.

Trees on the property itself can also be protected — significant tree registers, vegetation protection overlays and environmental overlays all apply somewhere across the metro area. Removing one because it was in the way is an expensive way to find out.

The crossover, footpath and kerb

Photograph them before you start. Trucks and machines damage concrete, and if the existing crossover was already cracked, the record is what stops the council attributing it to your job.

An asset protection permit generally requires this documentation anyway. Do it properly — a dated set of photographs takes ten minutes and settles arguments that otherwise take months.

Just talk to the neighbours

The obligations above are legal. This one is not, and it is still the highest-return thing you can do.

Tell the adjoining owners what is happening, roughly when, what hours, and give them a number to call. Demolition is loud, dusty and briefly alarming to live beside. Neighbours who have been told tolerate it. Neighbours who were not told call the council, and a council officer standing on site is a delay that no program has contingency for.

We fence properly, water for dust, keep the street clean and work sensible hours — not because it is required, but because the alternative costs everybody time.