demo = weekend project?

For our first *big* project, we've decided to tackle the parlour in the front of the house. We bought ourselves a crowbar and bagster and chatted with 3 electricians about rewiring and the city renovation folks for permits and such. We're now thinking of doing the electrical ourselves and decided to start with demo ASAP (Sunday). All the people we've talked to kept saying the demo would take a weekend...but we smugly told ourselves weekend for ordinary folk = 1 day for us.

 So we stuffed our couches outside the parlour doors into the hallway - the thing about old houses is that the doors are so darn small, you can't get modern couches through them.

hoping we get this room done soon so we can use our front door again.

Parlour doors behind our favorite leather couch; Pong above

 We drove right in and was able to make decent progress on a wall fairly quickly. The first wall we worked on however, was an exterior wall with blown in insulation, which is a BIG pain, and really dusty. Also plaster walls are super heavy with lath behind, which we also have to take down.

Those 2x4s were FULL of insulation you can see crumbling above the floor boards. The plan is to put in new wiring, new insulation, and cover it all up with drywall.

Lath = wood slats on which the plaster is attached.

safety first: gloves, goggles, masks. I had a harder time with the goggles and mask than Dan, probably because they're made for white people.

End of day 1.

We ended day 1 with most of the four walls cleared and really just the bit behind the radiator was left. Dan estimated ~90% done and looked forward to finishing in the morning of day 2 and watching the Germany-Denmark game in the afternoon.

 Ohho~ 90% you say? Finishing took us the whole next day (10am-6:30pm) and we didn't even clean up the floors, really. We had to tear down ceiling trim and even one floor board, as well as most of the window frames to really get all the lath cleared out so that we can actually put drywall floor to ceiling.

so relieved we didn't have to remove the radiator - our neighbor John says that thing weighs ~250lbs!

ceiling trim gone

window frames gone

I hope waste management doesn't deem our bagster too full

End of day 2: dusty, grimy, dirty. look at our glasses!

 Lesson learned. Demolition does take a weekend...Poor Dan missed all the games during these 2 days :(