The first person in 15 years to treat the house with any respect is Delmus Gaskins, the man who's come to knock it down. His workday starts at 8 a.m., when he drives up in his dusty Ford pickup. Gaskins gets out and hobbles over on his 67-year-old knees and looks at the house, 235 E. 255th St. in Euclid. Scrap thieves have ripped the white aluminum siding off the front of the house and down the north side, along the gravel driveway. They didn't bother stripping the other half because the neighbor's fence sits too close. So the house stands gaping and uneven, its plywood walls exposed to the wind, and wisps of pink insulation hanging like unshaved whiskers.

Gaskins sticks out both his lips. It looks as though he's gasping for breath, but actually this is the expression he wears when his mind is picking at something complicated. First, the house must come down. Once it's chopped into little pieces, it may fill four dump trucks. Maybe five. The foundation will need to go, and Gaskins will bring in two truckloads of topsoil to fill the hole. That's a lot of trucks rumbling down this little street. Then there's hay to lay, grass to seed, two city inspectors to please, and seven workers and their families to feed.

With a little luck, Gaskins can turn this house into a field by noon.

"All right, you can go ahead and take it down," Gaskins shouts to Jimmy Humphrey, the excavator driver. "The trucks is comin'."

Humphrey climbs over the tank treads and into the cab. It's still possible to see the company's name, Lightning Demolition & Excavating, painted under the rust and scrapes on the excavator's yellow side. Humphrey swings the 48-inch steel bucket in a fast, 180-degree arc. He stops short and uses the bucket like a claw to pick off a few pieces of siding. After that, he lifts the boom high above the little house and brings it down hard on the front wall, like he's punching a man in the forehead. The front half of the house collapses. Another worker uses a fire hose to blast water into the hole and control the dust. A fireplace, painted the color of raw chicken breast, sits strangely exposed in the morning sunshine. A soft nudge from the machine brings the chimney down, and the bricks fall through the floorboards onto the bare dirt below - most of the house has no foundation. Next Humphrey raises the bucket high and slams it straight down onto the roof.

The roof collapses in a weird way. Instead of breaking into pieces, it spreads and sinks, moving like water in a pool when a fat man does a cannonball. By now a few neighbors have brought their morning cigarettes and coffee mugs outside to watch the destruction. One of them, Mary Conroy, explains that in the mid-1990s, a tree demolished half the roof during a storm. Instead of fixing the damage, she says, the owner covered the hole with a tarp and spent the insurance money on a white Corvette.

"It was like trying to fix a gunshot wound with a Band-aid," Conroy says.

Water seeped through the tarp and into the walls. In 1997, the owner put the house up for sale. When Conroy took a tour, she could smell the mold growing behind the wallpaper.

It was about this time when the house stopped being a house in the traditional meaning of the word, and became something else - a flipper, a commodity, an asset against which other debts are leveraged. The house sold in February 1997 for $1,000. Seven months later, it sold again for $28,000. A year after that, a Cleveland police officer bought it for $88,000. The cop used the house to win a home remodeling grant from the federal government, Conroy says. He spent a fraction of the money on a new paint job and used the rest to fix up his own house out in the 'burbs.

After that, the deed was passed between six different investment trusts. In 2006 the house was sold to its current owners, Reginald and Minya Willis of Cleveland Heights, for $93,000.

The house still had three bedrooms crammed into 1,118 square feet. It had cheap cabinets, thin carpet, a hole in the roof and black mold growing up the walls. Inside, the air was so foul you could barely breathe. Maybe the banks were conned, but renters were not. The house sat vacant for seven years. By the time Delmus Gaskins bid the job, there was no more profit left to take.

"We're not making any money here today," Gaskins says. "We're doing this just to give our workers paychecks and keep diesel in the machines."

Lightning Demolition & Excavation said it could do the work for $4,000. That would be a lot of money for all the out-of-work construction guys who are scrambling for a piece of the demolition business now that 1,000 houses a year are being demolished in the city of Cleveland alone. But those guys usually work in two-man crews with just a bulldozer and a pickup truck. It takes them days to remove a house. And when they're done, the lot is often so uneven and pocked with bricks that a lawnmower can't get across it without breaking a blade.

When Gaskins bids on a job, he has a fleet of nine excavators, the smallest of which weighs 80,000 pounds. He has five trucks and 10 workers who can swarm a house like an invading army. The demolition itself takes only a few minutes. By the end of the day, the lot is so flat it might as well have been planed by a glacier.

"You should see what this other company did last week on Williams Street. It looks like hell," Joe O'Donnell, Euclid's building inspector, tells Gaskins when he comes to check the work. "But you guys are doing a real good job. Nice and flat."

By the time O'Donnell leaves, most of the house has been stuffed into trucks and hauled to the dump. The foundation that supported the front third of the structure turns out to be hollow, so Humphrey, the excavator operator, grabs one long wall of concrete in his bucket, lifts it high in the air, and drops it against a slab on the ground. Humphrey smiles. He just did a 10-ton karate chop. The boulders are loaded into the last waiting truck.

At the back of the lot, another worker digs both hands into a bale of hay and begins shaking it out over the ground. Gaskins reaches into a 50-pound bag of grass seed and scatters a handful of yellow grains.

"We don't scrimp on this stuff," Gaskins says. "Sometimes we buy a thousand dollars' worth of grass seed in one day."

A few minutes after noon, Gaskins sends most of the crew home with half a day's pay and the afternoon off. Their truck tires leave behind trails of dirt. Gaskins shuffles back to his pickup, takes out a rusty shovel, and uses it to pick mud out of the street.

"Got to give the grass a little drink of water," Gaskins says softly. He lifts the fire hose. The cell phone in his pocket rings. One of his workers is waiting for him at another house in Maple Heights. It's a bigger job. If all goes smoothly, there's profit to be made. Gaskins ignores the phone and twists on the hose. A stream of warm white water arcs over East 238th Street and lands in a flat field of hay.