Demolition begins!

May 7, take occupancy, and arrive with a bag full of tools and start to work immediately! Al came over, and went to work on the cabinets in the kitchen. We removed them gently, so that I could re-use them in the garage. My buddy Adam also came over, as he thought he might salvage some of the cedar. The shots you see of the kitchen are sans cedar, and you can see the wall that we took out between the kitchen and the small bedroom (4th pic in the list).

While it doesn't look like that much work, try to imagine eight pickup truck loads of debris... then imagine sweeping/picking it all up, and carrying it by hand out to the curb. I lost about 10 lbs that summer. Tried to eat as much as I could, and I was still burning more energy than I could ingest. Not to mention how dirty and messy it was. All the pics show things as I was cleaning up for the day. Take a wrecking bar to plaster and lathe, and crap flies everywhere!


You'll notice some detail pics where the wall came down. The previous renovator had put a wall oven into this wall, and in order to fit the cabinet in, they simply cut the 2x4 studs! No header, no additional support! You could actually see cracks in the plaster where the ceiling had sagged slightly. Luckily, there is no livingspace over the kitchen, so it wasn't in danger of collapsing. I put up a temporary support wall, and hired a guy to build a support beam to carry the load. In ~4 hours, this guy comes in and out - a brand new beam for under $400.

I took some surfaces down to the lathe, some down to the original plaster only. If the plaster was ok, we simply ran 1/4" drywall right on top. Where the plaster was falling or in bad shape, we put up 5/8". With my new flush-mounted beam, it makes for a seamless transition between kitchen and TV area.

I love the pic of the living room, with the cedar and brick hearth removed. It looks like something straight out of a war zone.

I decided early on to expose the brick chimney (from the furnace downstairs) and clean it up, and use it as a showpiece in the kitchen. I put a wire brush into my drill, and set Christine loose on it. After blowing off the dust/debris, and a few coats of clear spray enamel, it looked pretty good.

I had to "re-order" some of the fir planks, so that where the wall ended before, you wouldn't see a straight line where a bunch of planks all stopped. You can barely see it now. Finally, the last few pics show the condition of the floor either under the carpet underlay, or the lino. I should say, layers of lino... there was a floating floor on top of lino, on top of plywood, over the original lino. We know that, because we found newspapers from 1938 under the last layer. We kept some cool adverts from them, framed and hung them around the house.

The house

Ahhh, the house. The inevitable conversation about "the house". The price of real estate in Vancouver. The bidding wars for a $700k fixer-upper. The difficulty getting contractors to show up. Yeah, I did it. Bought a house. Didn't think it was possible, but it was time. So here we are, Sunday morning, coffee cup in hand, 10 months after, thinking about what to do next. While I was flipping through my old pics, I thought I'd take a few minutes to organise them on a web page.

May 6, 2005... no, scratch that. Rewind to April, and for some reason, started poking around on the websites, looking at some "coach houses" or detached townhouses. I went to peek in the window at one on Columbia at 14th, and it was pretty cool - ~1,200 sq. ft., 2 level, with private garage. Asking price was $659k. I got to chatting with my sister-in-law, as her and my brother just bought a house in the SW Marine area, and thought she'd know the market. She was the one that talked me up to a house... "for a hundred grand more, you could have a house". Hmmm.

Ok, so that is a bit of a stretch. Sure, you can get a house in Cambie for $750k (or could, at the time), but you were either in a bidding war for something that listed at $679k with no basement, no garage, and a lot of work, OR it was a complete disaster, that had been sitting on the market for many weeks, with no movement. I won't bore you with the details of the search, but I didn't want to be rushed into things, so went the latter route.

Maybe it wasn't a total piece of crap. It had a half-decent basement suite, which gave me a place to live while I demo'ed the main floor. The top floor, 2 bedrooms, is ok for now, and does just fine for a spare bedroom and my office. The links to the left show you some of the pics I took, before, during and after (links open in new window). Of particular note, is the massive use of cedar in the kitchen, living room, den, and bathroom (I called it "the sauna").


Nice eh?