1 hour later into Demo Day 1...

DEMO DAY 1
05/18/2007


Like I said, three men and an hour later into demo, and we have this:

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Apartment B's front room. Notice the stripped fireplace/chimney and the original plaster shell of the small closet to the left. The plaster looks like icing on layers of a cake, doesn't it? I think it looks pretty cool.



Apartment B, front room, still. Notice the lack of insulation. The boards you see are the exterior siding. There was nothing between it and the interior drywall, except air. And lots of old spiderwebs.



Front room, Apartment B, looking into front room, Apartment A.




Front room Apartment A. Behind the wood lathe strips is Apartment B's bathroom.


Front room, Apartment A, looking into Front Room, Apartment B. Yep, the curtains are gone. Oops.



Apartment B's bedroom fireplace wall, behind the front room's fireplace. See how the small closets (probably original coal closets) were sandwiched in there, side to side? Kind of neat.



Apartment B's bedroom, looking at another wood lathe strip wrapped wall of Apartment B's bathroom. The hole behind the door? Apartment A's wee closet in its bedroom.



In Apartment B's bedroom, looking towards the back of the house, into its kitchen. Brother-in-law is in almost every picture, no? He deserves the credit, he worked hard.



Here we're in Apartment B's kitchen, looking towards the front of the house, spotting bro-in-law and good friend. See the door in daylight wayyy up there? That's the front door to Apartment B. You can see all the way through the house!

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You may be wondering why I chose to tear out the existing drywall. There are a couple of reasons for this. In addition to the drywall being unprofessionally installed (or hastily installed) way back when, it was plain ugly and some spots had suspicious moldy-looking areas. Whoever replaced the original plasterwork with drywall found no need to insulate the house at that time, either. The house also has stubbornly held onto its original ancient electrical wiring, with not-so clever patch jobs into this delicate and dangerous matrix of crumbling wires. The same can be said of the plumbing, which proudly struts its authentic cast-iron pipes that carefully conceal inner erosion and barricades of build-up.

And all of this desperately needs to be updated in the house. Courtesy of my wallet, of course. Some may think it's unnecessary to demo out this work, but really for the safety of the house itself, and to make it completely livable, it needs the modernization. I'm not compromising its integrity, rather I'm ensuring its existence into the next hundred years.

Something else we found during the demo: evidence of past termite activity. I suspected and expected the damage in a few areas, but only in a few instances will the wood framing have to be replaced. Most of it is just surface damage, which really is nothing (I've had my contractor check it out, just to make sure). Lucky for me, the house is so old it was built out of heart pine lumber, which is such a hard wood it is naturally resistant to pretty much everything expect fire (boy does it burn, and hot!). Termites especially don't like heart pine, and only ate away in areas that had water damage or leaks. Luckily we found no active colonies and not a single live termite. And as a precaution, I will have the house inspected and treated before the construction begins, and regularly afterwards.

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Next entry, Demo Day 1, after another hour has passed. Hey, it was the first day, I was excited and took lots of pictures!