Demolition in Action

Update: if you can't see the video, click on "Read more..." below.

Update 2: not sure if you can see the video, I've rearranged the order of paragraphs on this post. Would someone comment to let me know if this is viewable? Thanks.

I took this little video on Saturday evening, but couldn't get it to upload to blogger until today (technical difficulties). It is just a sample of what work was like this weekend, and the experience of walking up to the echoing new space from the basement, which I had to do 1000 times that day turning off and on circuit breakers while HomoDommi messed with the electricity.

Day 3. We have wronged Tasha

Today was long and productive, with three of us on the job. Boom! The pantry and broom closet gone. Pow! The cabinets (in fact, the whole wall) backing onto the basement stairs - disappeared. Ratazz! The sink cabinet carved down to a sink cabinet (with nothing on either side).  Krazit! The structural supports for the dropped ceiling - out of the house.

(Thursday - HomoDommi on the phone vs. tonight, with cat-blur.) We now have a large, echoing, high-ceilinged room, with nothing but appliances (all working, thankfully) -- sink, fridge, stove and dishwasher. (I'm not counting the shop-vac, the saw-horse-and-plank table of tools, or the portable stool holding the phone).  All the electrical hot ends are tidied up and put aside for the contractor electrician to take care of (we are down from three lights to one. Sadly, the one isn't much dimmer than the three had been).  There are also two gaping holes in the floor, one where the chimney used to be, and another unearthed under a cabinet next to the bathroom.

From the number of mouse droppings -- and indeed, a desiccated skeleton of a mouse under the rotted floor of the sink cabinet -- we have concluded that these are not the work of merely one mouse. Some of it, we can tell, is more recent than work we did last summer. So, clearly, Tasha has not been bringing mice into the house, but catching current residents. She is due apologies, and has been awarded extra canned food.

No big surprises today, at least of the pleasant sort.  We found a section of old linoleum, which HomoDommi had seen before in another corner.  The sink cabinet was completely rotted on the floor, but (we were pleased to learn) the floor underneath that is as strong as ever.

HomoDommi is in town only one more day, this trip. Ideally, in that day, he'd complete about 4 days' worth of work -- so clearly, he will be coming back in a week or two.  We will try to help him finish anything that needs to be done before the contractors (plumber and electrician) come in.

Kitchen Reno, Day 2

Amazing, how tiring this work is.  I underestimate the stamina that sheer physical labor requires -- I spent most of the day at the bottom of the ladder, waiting for HomoDommi to hand shards of drywall and wood down to me, and I am exhausted!

(Before and after one set of cabinets. Click on the photos if you really want to see them in more detail. 

Note all the dust in the air -- I'm glad we're wearing respirators.)

Today went slower than yesterday.  We finished removing the sheetrock from the ceiling of the "hallway"  -- the 6 foot wide area between the foyer and the kitchen proper.  We removed a couple of the 13 foot struts that were supporting the dropped ceiling. Both of these involved electricity -- moving (and removing) light fixtures, making sure we didn't cut through a live wire while cutting the wall.  We also removed one wall cabinet and one base -- both had been very securely built into their corner, and did not come off gracefully.

Looking up at the ceiling, such as it is -- most of the darker brown is the subflooring for the bathroom upstairs (left or top). That mound in the corner is a sheet of paint that peeled off the ceiling -- heat and humidity and 5 decades of no air? (right or bottom)

The original ceiling is in bad condition.  Much of it is missing -- the lathe and plaster is even gone.  Sheets of pale aqua paint had peeled off the original ceiling and lay, like, ahem, sheets, over the 2x4 struts above the sheetrock dropped ceiling. By now it is brittle and dry, so they shatter into dust when we would pull off the sheetrock.  The other thing that flitters down (aside from paint chips, sheetrock and wood) is mouse turds -- only in one corner (the hallway), although there were heaps of them under the base cabinet we removed. (Tasha has spent many hours fixedly staring at that cabinet, but there's no way to tell if these are recent or ancient droppings.)

We can tell by paint lines (where paint remains) that the room was somehow proportioned differently -- there's a 4 square foot area painted in lines around the former chimney, which is a mystery, and there was something like a pantry, but taller, where the "new" pantry was put.

There was one surprise today. We ripped some of -what we thought was just drywall-paper - off when removing a support strut. Instead, it appears to be a wallpaper (which was painted white when the family moved in) that had been papered over another wallpaper. You can see the 2 x 10 inch swatch we uncovered.  It looks 1940s-ish to me. What do you think?  (I like this photo, even tho' the wallpaper bit is small, because you can see a bit of HomoDommi's mural in the next room in the background.

Kitchen Reno, Day 1

Take me to your leader!

So, we started today.  HomoDommi flew in from Boise; we stopped at the Big Box Hardware Store on the way home and bought demolition kits (bunny suits, respirators, plastic, a new ripsaw blade). And we started mid-afternoon. (The Texan and I had emptied the room last night.)

Before and After

Taking down the ceiling -- the hanging drywall, not the structural support, yet -- took only 2 or so hours after we decided to do it.  We vacillated: upon closer examination, the original ceiling, and the airspace between the original and the dropped ceiling, are in very bad condition (for instance, much of the original lathe and plaster is long gone due to -- we take it -- flooding and repair of the bathroom above the kitchen many years ago).  But, we reckon, tearing out the ceiling all the way will make life easier (= cheaper) for the electrician, and for HomoDommi, who will have to do some plumbing work to move a couple of pipes upwards about 6 inches.  And the room will look much nicer with the original 108" ceiling than the dropped thing we've been living with.

The job was dusty. We believe the paint on the original ceiling was lead paint, and it is mostly flaking off. So, bunny suits and respirators for the workers (us).  They were great, actually. It is so nice to be doing a nasty job -- in my case, standing below HomoDommi as he rips down a square meter of ceiling tile that dumps a pound of dust and plaster bits and lathe bits and flakes of paint down on my face -- and be able to breathe and see through it.  Rather a surprise, like the first time wearing scuba equipment under water -- you mean, I can breathe down here?!

We've only half done the ceiling, however. More tomorrow, and then -- for the remaining two days that HomoDommi is in town, seeing what else we can move forward.

Dining Room Project: Removing the Ceiling

A couple of months ago, I wrote about tearing down the chimney in the kitchen. Let me tell you what happened next -- the next day, actually. We rented a trash container and pulled down the dining room ceiling.

Please note, for future reference, the plain ceiling, the plain cove-moulding (it might even be quarter-round, I can't remember), and the dark blue walls.

First, having just finished the dusty chimney demolition, we taped off the archway to the living room and covered the stained glass windows and the mullioned bookcase doors on the east end of the room. The ceiling removal was nowhere near as messy; it took us about 3 hours from start to finish.

The people who hung the false ceiling in the 1950's did it simply. They nailed 13' lengths of 2x4s across the ceiling, and then applied drywall to it. All we had to do was crack the drywall and pull it down, and then pry off the 2x4s without destroying the beams. The Man, being taller, did the standing-on-the-ladder pulling, and I threw the bits out the window into the container in the driveway alongside. Almost as efficient as the people who put the thing up. Not as messy as chimney demolition, the dust we kicked up is visible in this photo.

Here you see the room from the opposite angle from the preceding photos, showing the protected windows to the east. He is holding an average size piece of drywall, ready to be thrown out the open window. The cross-hatch work above him shows the dark wood box beams with the unfinished 2x4s at more frequent intervals across it.



The boards came down with little fuss, leaving relatively unharmed, lovely original old-growth fir box beams, and an original plaster over lathe ceiling. The box beams form a central open rectangle in the room. My camera can't quite pick up the beauty of the wood -- I will try to photograph them again with controlled light.



Details: If you blow-up the close-up on the right (click on it), you can see:

1) The long hole down the middle of the room in the lathe-and-plaster where the people in the 50's ripped through to install the one additional support for their crossbeams;

2) Some damage here and there to the beams, during the installation of the dropped ceiling (on the beam below the hole, for instance). Generally, however, there was little damage, and the beams didn't need more than a wipe to remove a thin coat of dust. They've spent 50 years sealed away from sunlight.

3) The imprint in the plaster of the original light fixture in the center of the room, half-obscured by our fixture. The original was round. We have a Rejuvenation House square-based fixture, a modern version of one from the same period.

4) One of the casualties to the beams that we discovered -- two missing boards from the box beams nearest the window. I wonder if they first tried to remove the beams and then decided to just install over them? Unplastered lathe is hidden under the beams.

5) If you look carefully, you can see curious striations on the walls, too: moving upwards, you see blue up to a point, a line of pink, irregular spots of brown plaster-paper, and then a wide line of gray, unpainted original plaster. From this we have worked out that the original crown molding in the room was quite deep -- about 5 inches. From books about the period, we can recreate that it was a somewhat textured cove molding with a picture rail underneath that. At some point between 1915 and 1950, the picture rail was removed and the plaster-paper painted pink (popular off and on from the 1920's through the 1950's). The crown moulding was removed only when they dropped the ceiling. We can't get anything exactly like the original (nothing that deep is available at Rejuvenation House) but we'll put in something more interesting than quarter-round.

6) If you look very carefully, you can see the hole in the wood at the intersection of the two beams shown behind the light fixture. Each intersection had the hole, and the faint imprint in the varnish of a round fixture. Peering into the narrow hole with a flashlight, you could see the original wiring (still hot, according to the electrical discharge monitor thingy) awaiting a bulb to illuminate. This is also typical of the style of the time.

Coming soon: Next steps in the Dining Room.