And the dust has settled

We're into it now! I'm starting to remember the feeling you get when you do manual labor all day. My fingers are a little tender and I'm sporting two new blisters from maneuvering a crowbar for a few hours.

We started out the day with a plan. First up, we visited the lumberyard for materials to build the wall on the north side of the stairs. Next, I demoed the plaster in the stairwell while Justin finished installing the seismic brackets. It it only took minutes before I had a good start to a giant pile of rubble.  Justin and I schlepped the plaster and lath out and Justin got to make a run to the dump. We've got a pretty clean slate now.

Justin has been dutifully installing Simpson hardware every 3 feet. He has a new tool, a palm nailer, which speeds things up but makes a ton of noise.

Here's Justin taking off the first strip of lath.

I took over the demoing so Justin could get back to his brackets.

 And, the clean slate, after the load had been dropped at the dump.

Demo Day IV & V

We made a ton of progress this weekend and are finally on the home stretch of demolition. Michelle & Ryan joined in the fun and helped us out on Saturday. Thanks R&M!

We spent the whole day smashing plaster and hauling lath and plaster out to the dumpster. Michelle and I were the primary haulers while Ryan and Justin got busy with the sledgehammers. We finished clearing the ceilings upstairs as well as the entire stairwell. By the end of Saturday we had the whole upstairs stripped down to the studs and all of the debris picked up and put in the dumpster. It was filthy, strenuous work!

Michelle and I had filth all over our faces at the end of the day. When I got in the shower that evening, the water ran gray through 2 shampoos.

Over night, our first snowfall of the season came and we woke up to about 2-3 inches of snow, an infrequent occurence in Seattle. It made driving from our house in West Seattle to Beacon Hill a little dicey due to the fact that Seattle doesn't own plows or salt the roads. But, we made it over the two big hills and back again safely.



Justin and I spent most of Sunday doing little details that wouldn't generate a lot of waste. I clipped all of the K&T wiring out of the first and second floors and unscrewed all of the recepticles in the living and dining rooms while Justin sawed off and capped the plumbing. We still have a functioning toilet which is mostly all I care about plumbing-wise. Ultimately, we wrapped up those tasks and took to removing the 700 billion nails from the studs. Each piece of lath is tacked onto the studs with two nails on either end and often two nails at each stud it crosses. When you pull off the lath, you usually pull a few nails with it but generally, you leave a bunch of nails behind. So, we spent about 2 hours pulling nails and still have about 250 billion nails left to go.

Here's Justin freezing his tush off extracting nails from the studs.

Demo Day III

Justin and Jill took the day off to carry the demolition a little further. The dumpster was emptied on Tuesday and it's full again today. We'll have it emptied on Friday so we will be set for the weekend. It's a little sad generating this much waste with our project. Hopefully the recycler will find something useful to do with lath and plaster bits.

Justin put his thinking cap on and built a chute out of ductwork from the house. He propped it up with our extension ladder. It was a modern day chutes & ladders in our back yard!


They wrapped up the day having cleared all of the piles of plaster and lath from the house and pulling out half of the ceiling in the master bedroom and the walls of the bathroom upstairs.

After an initial hack-fest on the fir trim throughout the house, Justin decided to put his kid gloves on and remove the remainder with the plan to reuse. He's salvaged much of what was left upstairs. Hopefully we can figure out how to clean this stuff up and reuse it.

Demo Day I

Today was a big day for our project. We had 6 of our best friends come over and work up a good sweat. Thanks Amy, Brian, Jill, Scott, Heidi & Aaron! We suited up to protect ourselves from lead paint which we assume is all over the house. Here's a group photo before we got too crazy with the sledgehammer.

We had to pull all of the carpet out of the house and pry up the tack strips. Here's Jill finishing up the job.
The kitchen was our first victim to the sledgehammer. We had so much debris that we filled the 7 yard dumpster and had a bunch of the lath left over so we built a bonfire (not really) in the kitchen. We'll get rid of this pile when Waste Management frees us of the first load--thanks Ben @ WM for hooking us up.
Aaron found a really cool bee's nest in a wall. Thankfully it had been long abandoned. This is going to be a treat to clean up!


Here's a view of the kitchen with most of the demo complete. We'll be opening up this wall a bit to make room for a peninsula from kitchen to the dining room but we're going to need some guidance from our architect on how to frame it out properly.
So, we finished up the day around 4pm, just as the sun was setting which was convenient since we were pooped. We accomplished a lot! The kitchen is stripped of its plaster and 2 of the 3 bedrooms upstairs have been gutted, except for the ceilings. We'll need an empty dumpster before we can get too much further and maybe some time to recoup our tired muscles.