RJK Operator Rob
Doble is using a
Komatsu PC150LC-6
excavator from RMS to
dig a foundation for a
new apartment building in northeast
Minneapolis.
good niche for us,” he continued. “We look first for demo work, and if that’s not available, we go for the excavating and the landscaping.” Kjellberg estimated about 30 to 35 percent of RJK’s business is demolition.
A recent interior demolition job for the new headquarters of the Minneapolis Parks Department went very well, according to Kjellberg. “They actually are retaining us by holding our contract open to do a change order through us versus the general because we treated them fairly all the way through,” he said. “We did the work on time and they like us. That says a lot.”
“We also do a lot of work for public agencies like the Minneapolis Community Development Agency,” added RJK Estimator/Project Manager Rob Cox. “We did the old Carpenter Lumber in Bloomington, Minnesota, for the Bloomington HRA. We cleared the entire site, which consisted of seven buildings.”
Crews do around 50 house demolitions a year, plus a number of commercial building demolitions, according to Cox. “Several years ago one job we did that everyone remembers was the demolition of the old Porkey’s Drive-in on Lake Street.”
Operator John Jerde
is stockpiling boulders
at a jobsite with RJK
Contracting’s new
Komatsu WA380-5
wheel loader.
The diversified
company is based in
Fridley and works
throughout the Twin
Cities metro area.
“And when Irondale High School added a new gymnasium, we did the excavation and interior demolition,” said Kjellberg. “It was about a $450,000 project, which is a sizeable project for us.”
The company recently excavated the underground parking facility for a senior housing complex. “We moved 30,000 yards of dirt,” said Cox. “But we’ll also Continued . . . do little excavation jobs, like a 10- by 10-foot addition. We’ll move 30,000 yards or we can move half a yard.”
While RJK crews work mainly in the Twin Cities metro area, Kjellberg is not averse to traveling. “Most of the contractors we regularly deal with work in the Twin Cities, so we haven’t done much traveling,” he noted. “But we’re bidding on the interior demo of a mall up in St. Cloud, just north of us. It’s a little over an hour trip, but it’s not too bad.”
Demolition an “art form”
Cox called taking down a building correctly and safely an art form. “You have to know how buildings are built, so when you take them down, they implode themselves into the hole, instead of falling on the neighbor’s house,” he stated.