Week 15 – Joe

We have had a little lull in demo work while finishing up our floor plans and lining up subcontractors.  During this time I have kept progress moving forward by continuing with the windows.  All the kitchen windows have been stripped, scraped, sanded, repaired, and primed.  I have also removed 5 other sashes from a few other windows in the house that needed immediate attention.  The sheer amount of time it takes to go through all steps of window renovation explains why it costs so much to have an expert do it. I glazed my first window today and it turned out better than expected.  I will include that in a future blog post.

This week my brother was in town!  He happily (I think) offered to help me each morning work on that day’s project.  The task for the week was getting everything ready for our framing guy.  A big decision we have been mulling over was about a particular wall in the master bedroom.  That room already exists and has minimal plaster damage…  it is (was) pretty much ready to go.  BUT if we knocked down one wall and moved it about 16 inches it opened up more room for the bathroom and alleviated some crowding created by the new stairs.  This week we finally knocked down that wall.  It wasn’t much compared to the quantity of plaster we dealt with in the kitchen and closets, but it was on the second floor and it is also a lot hotter now than it was back then.

We had to remove the insulation on the exterior of the wall we were knocking down, then got busy removing all the plaster and lath.

We were hoping the chimney would have some nice exposed brick to add to the master bedroom because it looks pretty good on the other side.  Unfortunately, the side that was covered by the wall LOOKS like they knew it was going to covered by a wall.

This was the first time I had to remove plaster and lath from the ceiling.  I was a little nervous that I would damage the rest of the wall and ceiling, but the Sawzall made a relatively clean cut and we didn’t have any unwanted plaster damage.

One unpleasant aspect of this job, besides the additional heat, was that we had to lug all the debris down the steep stairs, through the kitchen, and out to the truck.

In order to prepare for the framer I also removed some plumbing in the wall that was blocking our new door to the basement, removed a couple studs, baseboards, and door jambs.  In addition, I removed a portion of the upstairs flooring where the stairs will be.  The opening is not the final dimension, but this will help facilitate getting the right location for the downstairs and upstairs bathrooms.

While we were upstairs we did unearth a few treasures.  In this space…

…we found a couple clothing items.  Obviously not from the Victorian era….  probably the 70s?

I forgot to include (in our previous post) this particular oddity that we found buried in the wall behind of the old sink in the kitchen.  It was actually a part of the structure, not just laying in the wall.

We already posted photos of a few newspapers we found under the linoleum in the master bedroom.  We uncovered many more these, all from 1936, which I assume is the date that they refinished the lone upstairs room.  At some point we will go through these and take pictures of the more interesting headlines and ads.

One of our more exciting discoveries were these old bottles…

Amy had it in her head that we were going to find bottles!  These were discovered when I stuck my head in a very small opening that allows access (kind of) above the kitchen.  They are both still sealed with a cork and have measurement lines indicated on the side.

There probably isn’t much more treasure to find because hopefully we are done with the major demo.  Now we will start to see more new stuff going into the house and less old stuff coming out of the house.  By the middle of this week we should actually have some new walls!  We are unreasonably excited about that prospect!

 

Follow our story and read the next post: Finally, something New- Walls!

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