Living Room

While things crank along with the architect, we’re continuing to prepare for first floor demolition. We decided that taking off all of the trim first would allow us to remove the plaster and lath more quickly, which will be important because when that happens we’ll need to rent a dumpster and they charge by the day. The pile of wood in the above picture is some of what we’ve gotten so far, which includes the baseboards from the living room and dining room, the crown molding from the dining room, and some door trim.

Under the door trim

Speaking of door trim, I decided against the “large” size for this picture. Inside the door frame are mass graves for roaches. We found similar if worse buildup when we were working on the second floor. On that topic, we haven’t seen any sign of cockroaches in a long time. We continue to bring out the exterminator every few months to make sure it stays that way. We’ve come an incredibly long way from seeing them every day or so and a light year from the absolute infestation that we started with. We’re confident that when the house is done there won’t be any evidence that they were ever here.

Dining Room

I’ve been reluctant to remove the trim from around the windows. I’m concerned the windows may actually be held in place by the trim in some cases. Some exploratory removal will be necessary to ensure we can pull it down without the windows falling out of the walls. We’ll also need to adjust our fancy “curtains” by taping them to the windows themselves rather than the trim.

Beadboard Closet Wall

As I was removing baseboard from the first bedroom I realized that the closet wall (which always looked a bit odd) was actually made of beadboard with some backing nailed together that had later been drywalled over. Here you can see the beadboard where the drywall broke off. It’s painted a lovely gold color, though the work light casts a yellow hue on everything anyway so it’s a bit hard to make out.

We’re consolidating all of the stuff we have stored on the first floor to the back bedroom so we can cordon off the back two rooms and demo everything else. To do that we have some more recycling pickups to get the rest of the broken down cardboard unloaded as well as taking down the moldy drywall in the back bedroom before moving all of our boxes and bins in. Sarah treated the mold with bleach last year so it should all be dead, but I really don’t want to take any chances.