Disposal fees and dust containment can be very costly. Bricks and mortar are very heavy and landfills charge by the pound. A dumpster and pickup alone can be $500 before additional weight fees.

$3k is not cheap or a bargain but I'm not sure it's outa line especially for SF. That said there's always someone that's cheaper.

In our area, contractors of any stripe have tough regulation on dust containment and disposal of demos. There is also the issue of potential damage to things that are not supposed to be demo-ed.
I'd certainly get other bids, but you may find they are also high and will confirm who you have picked.

Thanks! My inclination is to stick with them if it looks like they're in the ballpark, since we do very much support their mission and going back to the bidding process would probably push back our start date another week or two---but if it were a difference of a lot of money, that might change our thinking. Good to have the perspectives!

Get a couple quotes on dumpsters, rental trailers, and general daylaborers for some perspective. You might find 3 grand is a bargain.

that actually sounds quite reasonable to me. We did the demo ourselves, and probably spent $1000 on renting trucks, dumpsters, and dumpsite fees. Of course that doesn't include the DAYS of backbreaking labor that went into bringing the lathe and plaster down!

For Northern California, that sounds pretty much in line, with a dumpster rental/disposal, abatement/containment, wall removal and tile/mortar removal.

The place to be for this is clearly the Southern Hemisphere! ;) At any rate, this thread is nearly four years old so our kitchen is long since demoed but we did end up using The Reuse People's kitchen deconstruction program. I'm not sure they even still offer it in Northern California now that the real estate market here is once again haywire and people are demoing entire houses again, but we were quite happy with them, and the final cost came in closer to $2500. Our space was a two-day job with a three-man crew, though a big chunk of that was removal of a clay chimney flue that was no small task. We did test negative for lead and asbestos in paint/flooring, but the EPA lead laws in particular have changed since then, so containment costs have gone up a lot there. I'm sure it is all more expensive now.

Serious question here from a die hard DIYer, why do you pay others to demo?

I understand paying other people to build, install, design, etc if you have no know how but why do people pay others to literally come in and demolish their current space?

Is there some sort of waste disposal code that has to be followed in certain areas?

That's a good question... in my experience dealing with the debris is a bigger issue than doing the demo. What we did in TX was call Habitat and they removed the entire kitchen since it was in good enough shape to resell. They planned on selling the formica countertops too! They were quick - it was maybe 5 hours from start to finish. One day of roto hammer rental was about $90 and I removed 300ish sq ft of tile myself. It was easy to dispose of, a couple of grocery bags at a time in the trash for 8 weeks or so.

Others I've known have paid in the $1.25-$1.75/sq ft neighborhood for tile demo. It's hard work when the stuff is installed on a slab.

Where we are now we did the same thing, except only the uppers were in good enough condition to donate. Little by little all of our debris found their way out through the trash by the curb except for one truckload I took to the dump myself. Residents can take one load per month for free here - anyone DIYing demo should look into it in their area too.

All pre 1978 homes have to deal with asbestos and lead testing. And the consequences of those tests being positive. That's EPA, and is national. Not just local. Local abatement and disposal regs can be stricter than national, and in many locations, often are.

In our case, we did consider doing it ourselves (we did a lot of the remodel ourselves), but had several big elements that were not super well-suited to first-time DIYers--mainly that we were removing a chimney (not hard, but messy and heavy), removing a wall (ditto), and drilling out ceramic tile floor, which while not hard was time-consuming. The rest of it was pretty straightforward but not as simple as modern kitchens, because it was an old house/old kitchen. So it was worth it to hire someone else to do it for the time and headache savings. We do also have pretty strict disposal laws in our state, so we would have paid some of that (I think quotes were $500ish?) just for the dumpster and permits, which the demo company handled, plus any needed tool rentals. They were also able to salvage $1500 worth of parts, so we got a tax receipt for that, which also helped offset the cost a little. (TRP, the organization we used, is the Northern California Habitat partner, so probably similar to Habitat demo programs elsewhere.) I definitely second-guessed some of our decisions on what to DIY and what to hire out, but demo wasn't one of them. :)