Dining Room Project: Prologue (Demolishing the Chimney)

Today was spent more in preparation than in projects, Andrew working on PTA now, rather than in a rush when he gets back in September. However, there's always lots to say.

A few people have written that they are looking forward to hearing about (and seeing) the Dining Room Project. Always one to stretch the suspense, let me back up to last April, when we discovered there was potential for a Dining Room Project.

It all started when we decided to take out the original furnace chimney. This is a large brick chimney extending from basement through roof, positioned in the exact center of the house. The old furnace had plugged into it for air outflow, but the new furnace has a simple pipe to the outdoors, so the chimney hasn't been used for 2 years. You see the chimney in the photo here, next to the pantry in the kitchen, masked by a slip of gray concrete.

[Historical note: the two red bricks in the chimney, visible near the ceiling: those are a really rough blocking job -- badly cemented in bits of brick. We are pretty sure the original kitchen had a large oil-powered range, with a small chimney that fed into the main one through this hole.The Baptists must have blocked the hole during the renovation in the 1950s -- no need to be tidy about the blockage, since it would be behind drywall. Other evidence of the large original range -- the floor in front of the door to the dining room (installed in the 50's) is a patch. There originally was a pipe to the oil tank in the basement, that fed the range. I found exactly this arrangement in a couple of books about Stickley and Arts and Crafts houses from the 19-teens.]

We knocked a hole in the basement part of the chimney about 2 feet from the floor (sorry for the blurry photo). Andrew constructed a "door" of plywood for the hole, and then we started demolition.

Andrew began by climbing on the roof and knocking bricks down the chimney. They rattled and bumped all the way down to the basement, and hit bottom with a carcinogenic mushroom cloud of ash, soot, brick dust and mortar. The "door" helped reduce the dust somewhat (we faced it with a layer of insulation to make a soft pad), but even so, there was a large puff of dust when the door was opened. I would reach in and remove the bricks (8 in a layer) and pile them in a bucket. Then slam closed the door, leaning against it so it would remain tight against the brick wall of the chimney, yell up that no hands were in the passageway, and Andrew would knock out the next layer of bricks. Periodically, Mel would carry a bucket to the window where we would pass them out (at our chest level) to William (at his feet), who would pile them up outside.

In this way, we removed the chimney, Andrew progressing slowly down from roof, through attic, through second floor (in the photo, he's at the top of the chimney where it passed through the upstairs hall, just below the attic), kitchen and finally joining us in the basement.

Mel and I switched jobs occasionally, but Andrew always got the fun and easy job of pushing bricks over. He was precariously balanced on a ladder for much of the time, but otherwise, it was surprisingly easy. The mortar had almost completely dried out -- the chimney was standing because it was held up by the house around it, and the weight of the bricks above it. He genuinely merely had to push the bricks over, most of the time. Our job, however, was wretchedly dusty. We were encrusted, everything in the basement and much of the house was covered in a fine red-gray dry mist. We had laid protective plastic over everything in my room, and created a little airlock around the chimney itself (like the government-quarantines-the-house scene in "E.T."), but it seemed to make little difference for the amount of dirt and dust everywhere.

However...imagine the moment when Andy was standing on the ladder, leaning into the chimney at the top of the kitchen wall. Suddenly he yells out -- "There's a hole in the wall behind the chimney, into the dining room!" But of course, there is no hole in the wall of the dining room, so we knew this was into a false ceiling space. It was like discovering a false bottom in the antique trunk your great-great-grandfather used when he lived in Germany and was a copywriter for Beethoven. What could be hidden behind the secret door? The photo doesn't show what we saw, which was only a sense of open space broken up by red beams of wood.

More on the Dining Room Project later...