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.