Category: First Floor Demo

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.

Work on the first floor has continued. After the demo party I worked on taking down the ceiling. I got all of it down except for the front bedroom where we stacked all the lath. The dumpster was hauled away and we’re left with the aftermath, which for the time being is mostly cleanup.

Full Dumpster

The first floor is currently a dusty mess. In addition to the room full of lath, the floors are coated in plaster dust and the walls are full of chunks of plaster that need to be cleaned out. There are also some bits here and there that still need to be torn down, along the edges of windows and such.

Post demo first floor

After spending a few hours with the shop vac sucking up plaster I decided I was going to take down some walls because it felt more productive. The wall between the dining room and the bathroom has clearly been modified at points in the houses existence. I’m guessing there was originally a built-in china cabinet in the wall of the dining room next to the chimney, since the space has been strangely closed in.

Dining room wall

Whatever the case, it was done a long time ago and then more recently modified. The boards were cracked in places and the whole thing was pretty rickety. I was impressed by how heavy the old 2x4s are. They’re definitely a lot more solid than the studs you get these days.

Wall removed

It’s took a lot less time and effort than removing chunks of plaster but it was a lot more satisfying. I’ll need to get back to cleaning, of course. There’s a lot of that left to do. I also need to figure out what to do with all the lath. The original plan of burning it seems inadequate to the volume of lath.

Wow. We had our first floor Demo Party this Saturday, and boy did we demo!

Kitchen Demo

Compare this to the photo from the previous post, which was taken in roughly the same place. Friends and family joined us for a party of mass destruction. We took down all of the tile, drywall, plaster, and lath on every wall on the first floor and hauled it out to the dumpster. The “crew” worked incredibly well together, moving seamlessly between the different tasks with almost no coordination or direction until it was done. We grilled up lunch and dinner since the work took over eight hours to complete, and it was capped with some needed relaxation in the back yard around the table.

It feels like we’ve taken a giant step forward, since now we can start to envision the process of putting it back together. It also feels like the “no turning back now” point, both exciting and frightening at the same time. There’s still a lot of work to be done before we can start building anything, and it will continue to be a slow slog, since not every day can be a sudden transformation like this one.

Sarah and my thanks go out (in approximate order of appearance) to David, Collin, Eileen, Rob, Nicole, Sei Youn, Eriq, Ariel, Dean, Siobhan, Will, Mike, and Lee for the tremendous amount of help they gave us. We owe all of you!

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.