Down & Dirty Demo built a Colorado Springs demolition company on tearing out old floors
Matt Rial and Mike Keigher grew up working in a family flooring business, then built a demolition company around getting old floors up fast.
Colorado Springs, CO
The Down & Dirty Demo logo is a cartoon of a bearded man riding a squat black machine over a heap of broken tile. The machine is real. In photos the company published from a 2023 office strip-out, it sits on a bare concrete slab: a seat, a steering post, a boxy black body with a yellow “Stand Clear” sticker, and a wide steel blade mounted low at the front, where it meets the floor.
It is a ride-on floor scraper, and the company put it first on its list of reasons to hire it, under “Specialty Equipment.” “Professional floor removal rider machine gets the job done fast so you can start your project,” the company wrote.
The scraper is the plainest clue to where the business came from. Matt Rial and Mike Keigher, the two men the company has named as its owners, are flooring people. Their demolition work starts where most remodels start, with the old floor that has to come up before anything new goes down.
Their own account opened with a short heading: “It started in Iowa.” The story that followed was not much longer. “Matt & Mike grew up in the Midwest working for the family flooring business,” it read. “They ventured to Colorado Springs and continued working in the renovation industry. They found a growing need for quality floor removal. So, they researched, upgraded equipment and can create a clean slate for renovations quickly and professionally.”
An earlier version of the home page put it in one line: “Matt & Mike are hard working professionals originally from Iowa.”
Down and Dirty Demo LLC was formed in Colorado in 2022, according to state business records. “As a family owned business we take pride in getting the job done right,” the company wrote.
The company’s list of services reads like an inventory of what is under people’s feet. Ceramic tile, vinyl tile and sheet vinyl, glue-down carpet, engineered wood and the adhesive underneath all come up. Walls come out too, on request. It takes residential and commercial jobs and quotes floors by size, with the line between a small job and a large one drawn at 1,000 square feet for tile and 5,000 for engineered wood.
The 2023 photos show what a commercial tear-out looks like from the inside. A roll-off dumpster heaped with debris sits outside a low office building. Inside, two workers in hard hats pull ceiling grid from a rolling scaffold against an orange wall. Another sweeps the floor below a man working from a scaffold. Two men in hard hats lean over a plan sheet spread on a table. A worker in a safety vest drags a cart piled with torn-out wall panels. Out on the open floor, past the columns and the walls marked in green spray paint, Keigher sits at the controls of the scraper and grins at the camera.
Air quality got its own heading on the company’s list of reasons to hire it. The note there ran two sentences: “Matt has a background in restoration. Ask about options.”
The company’s mission statement was a single sentence. “We believe in hard work and treating people honestly and respectfully,” the owners wrote. Elsewhere they boiled the standard down further, to “Demo done right.”
The company works out of Colorado Springs and takes jobs as far as Pueblo to the south and Castle Rock to the north.
Its early home page drew the line between its work and the customer’s in four words: “We Demo, You Reno.”