Slow Going

Work has continued but not very quickly. Sarah recently started graduate school, which understandably preoccupies her time, and Derek is now nine months old and becoming less interested in chilling out while we work. I have managed to get a little bit done.

Living room cleanup

One task was to clean up the debris in the front yard. During the demo party we had a chute from the front window down to the yard to speed up plaster removal, but of course some of it wound up on the ground. You’ll recall from an earlier post that our front yard is all wood chips. Removing the bits of plaster is tedious at best, and I daresay I’ll never remove all of it, but the majority is cleaned up and the front yard looks a bit better.

Next, I got the remaining plaster and lath down from the corners and behind the radiator in the living room. The “ribbon” that is set into the exterior wall studs to support the floor joists complicated efforts to remove all the lath, but I’m working through one room at a time. I used the shop vac to suck out more of the plaster from between the studs, but I haven’t finished that yet. There’s pockets between the studs in the exterior wall the depth of the floor joists that filled up with plaster bits during demo, and getting it all out is slow work with regular cleaning of the shop vac filter.

Plaster pockets

While the living room is one of the largest rooms in the first floor, the fact that I’m not finished with it and it’s the first one I’ve tackled suggest that completing the cleanup will be a lengthy affair, especially given how little I’ve been able to work on it these past few weeks. Even after I finish cleaning up all the rooms I’ll need to do a second pass to remove all the nails from the walls and ceilings. I’m hopeful that I can make some better progress this Labor Day weekend. For the first time in a while we’re not going anywhere.