Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Demolition Day #2 --- Saturday

Ahhhh....a new day....crawl out of bed....bed being a relative term....bed is actually a blow up twin size mattress sitting on a cold floor with an electric blanket over it. but, hey, technically...it IS a bed. we are sleeping at the beast....where there is no heat or water....but we have a roof over our heads, tv and a refrigerator. LOL  well, we do have a small electric heater in the room.

Anyway...where was i...crawl out of bed...pop some ibuprophen....and head on over to the duck. i got there about 7am...ready to rock and roll. today's project is to take out a bedroom wall that has a closet on the other side of it. i want to remove this wall entirely and eliminate the 'closet'. in the meantime, my sis is taking tiles off the wall in the bathroom this time....she wants those, too.

It's kind of funny...when we were doing demolition at her place...the beast...i was dragging home her closet doors and cabinets and other things that i wanted for the farm. now she is taking tiles and slats and trim from the duck for the beast. we are just recyling things back and forth. LOL

Here is what that bedroom wall looked like before i worked on it. see how that wall is right up against that window. i know (hope) the original contractor didn't do that. i think somewhere along the line they put that wall up to make a 'closet' between this room and the office. the closet runs the whole length of the room and has a door from each end into each room. i don't like it and it is going.


I have removed the door and door framing from this wall. at least the plaster in this room is much thinner than in the office area. i can run my pry bar behind it and just knock it down.


When this wall was taken out....i found a pipe in the wall....coming down from the ceiling...no cap on the end of it....wonder what that was all about? when i started knocking the plaster off....i saw the end of that pipe between the slats and was thinking...what in the world is THAT?....so i pulled some slats off to take a peek. right by the end of the pipe someone drew a little arrow...pointing into the room. i wish i knew the story behind this. LOL



All the windows in the house have these cute little valance things above them. i don't know if i will put them back up or not but i am saving them for now. i don't know who added that piece of plywood over the top of the window...they are all like that. there were venetian blinds hanging right under that....the only thing i can think of is that the blinds were too short if you hung them all the way to the top of the window...so someone improvised by adding that lovely piece of plywood to cover the window....yuck!!


Just makes me wonder....what do people think about when doing these things....that is so ghetto looking. siggghh!!   under the valance scrolly thing are rods to hang curtains. AND....they are hiding beautifully detailed corner blocks at the tops of the windows. so those valance things probably won't go back up....so the corner blocks will show. i have a LOT of paint stripping to do.

I also took down a lot of ceiling tiles today. here is the bedroom ceiling before....



And after... notice my lovely ceiling fan. every room in this house has a ceiling fan.....and every single one of them is in some sort of disrepair. they will all need to be trashed and replaced.



And ceiling tiles came off the office ceiling....



And off the dining room ceiling...this ceiling is in the worst shape...there was water leakage up here from days past and it disintigrated most of the plaster ceiling. i will knock off the loose stuff but not remove slats. all the ceilings have the 1x4's up there to hold the tiles that were in place. i will take out all the staples and use those pieces of wood to attach my ceilings....whatever they may be.


My sister was studiously removing wall tiles in the bathroom and filling up a huge box to save them. there were different colors. and whoever 'remodeled' the bathroom at some point put up some fiberglass fake 'tiles' over the ceramic tiles. so that had to be removed first. it was a supreme pain in the you-know-where. by the end of the day....she had removed all the tiles from this wall....the one that i wanted to move. they had plywood under these tiles. big sheets of heavy plywood.


And, being true to form....i whacked my thumb once again today....same thumb. this time even harder...knocked off another piece of skin and turned it a lovely purple color. i'm dangerous....to myself. LOL

My sister's other job of the day was to install a new doorknob for me. the old one was giving me trouble getting in....seemed like it was all loose and about to fall apart. so i stopped by the hardware store and got a new one to make do until i get a new door. she's very handy....my sister. she just installed the knob....that ugly metal part around the door was already there.


During this tear down period....we have pretty much filled the living room, hallway and part of the dining room with bags of trash (slats)....and piles of wood and paneling and plywood. so it really was time to haul it all out to the garage to await a dumpster. but you know...tearing it all out is the fun part....hauling it out the house....down the steps....across the yard...and into the garage seemed like WORK. so, while i was at the hardware store i asked the guy if he knew someone who wanted a bit of work hauling trash for me. and as it happened, he knew a guy that was a roofer who was out of work and could use some cash. so i left him a message and he showed up and we made a deal for him to clean up after me....what a deal. so, tomorrow he will show up and haul all the debris out to the garage. it gives me more incentive to pack up more stuff into bags. LOL

I worked from 7am till about 5pm then gave it up. i don't have electric so when the sun goes down it gets a bit dark. i actually lasted until 9pm until i crashed for the night....not bad for an old lady.

Stay tuned for day 3


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