Discoveries on Demo Day 6

Demo Day 6
07/20/2007

I worked by myself on this Demo Day. I didn't really mind it, either. It was truly the first one where it was just me and the house. It's just the way things happened, and I made a few discoveries.

In the bathroom of Apartment B, I set to tear out the dropped ceiling, which I figured was covering the original plaster ceiling. I could only tear out one side of the bathroom ceiling, though. The other side seems to have plywood or paneling underneath the drywalled, dropped ceiling.

This is the side I managed to tear out:

Isn't it beautiful? Every time I find an original ceiling like this, I feel like I've stumbled upon a time capsule of sorts. I know it's damaged but that's part of what makes it so appealing to me. And the color! I wish you could see it in person, as the picture doesn't do justice to its vibrancy in person. And to think it's been covered up for decades...

Here's another shot of the same ceiling, from the other side of the short area I was able to uncover. Eventually all of this will be torn out, too, to make way for the new layout, but hopefully you'll see this color again in the new house. It has inspired me.


This is the kitchen on Apartment B's side. You might remember that I had already begun tearing out its dropped ceiling a few demo days back. But that day I was mainly exploring to see what was there. This was the first original ceiling that I'd found in the house. Actually, now that I think about it, there's only the two: this one and the one in the bathroom, you've just seen. All the others had been replaced with drywall along the way by someone else. The wood framing you see is how the dropped ceiling was hung.


More discoveries! You can barely tell in the picture, but do you see the strip of molding that seems to run along the top of the framing for the dropped ceiling? The painted, yellowish-beige color? That's original picture molding. Since the walls were originally plaster and did not take kindly to nails for hanging pictures, they used to install this molding about a foot below the crown molding around the top of the room. The upper edge of picture molding is rounded and comes away from the wall slightly so that a hook can fit snugly on it. Pictures were hung from these hooks, attached to ribbons or chains that attached to the back of the picture frame.


Still in the kitchen of Apartment B. Here you can see the original crown molding on the left hand wall, up top, and the original picture molding a foot below on the right hand wall, just above the wood framing. I don't have a piece of wall with both the moldings still in place, but from this corner, and careful measuring, I'll be able to replace similar moldings throughout the house. Isn't it exciting to find something like this?


And the final room where I made a discovery on this day:

You're in Apartment A's bedroom, leaning down and looking up at the back of the wall to the kitchen. This small room on the back of the house is an original room, meaning it was constructed with the rest of the house and not added on, but I wasn't sure how high its ceilings were. Do you see what I saw? That white strip of crown molding?


It proved to be evidence to me that the ceiling in this room was dropped, too. So I also tore out this ceiling. Someone else had already torn out the original plaster ceiling and replaced it with these ceiling tiles (seen above the framing). I'll tear those out another day.


Here's another, clearer shot of the original ceiling height after I've removed the dropped ceiling. The ceilings all came down fairly easily, with coaxing from a sledgehammer. I was able to get these ceilings down by standing on the floor, since I'm so tall. I decided to wait until help was there before I tried to tear out the taller ceilings, like the plaster ones and the tiled ones. I don't really fancy swinging a sledgehammer while on a ladder and no one around to fall on. Ha.

It was very cool to find out I'll be able to restore all the ceilings in the house to their original height of 10 feet. It will make the small house seem that much more open and airy.