Tearing down the house

December 4, 2010

No worries, we're not going to try to pull a 2002 Maine on you and rip down a historical home; however, I was feeling a bit destructive today. I decided to take it out on this very small, and oh so lovely hallway (this connects the apartment to the foyer and contains the entrance to the basement):

View from the apartment into the hallway




Stairs of the hidden staircase


Faux brick. I peeled up a side and there are wood floors underneath. Who the heck covered hard wood with sticky backed, faux brick.


View from the foyer to the apartment


Old light fixture in the hall. If you look closely to the right side of the picture but the left side of the molding, you will notice that they ran the wire directly down the wall here and drilled a hole in the faux brick to get it to the basement.

I warmed up the steamer for 30 minutes, worked on peeling wallpaper for about 10, and proceeded to start tearing down the wall. Here I am on my path of destruction:





Not only was this another area where it was partially painted/partially wallpaper, but a large chunk of wall came down when I took down the lovely coat rack.

Here was the progress by the end of the day:


Here is the area in the hall that goes downstairs:

This would be the opposite wall of the wall that is being torn off. We need a real door for this.

As I was taking that very exciting picture, I looked at the handrails going to the basement, what do you notice?


I am taking that picture straight. They made one of the handrails start a good foot after the other for the door to swing open. Interesting.

In other news, the work on the outside of the house is at a bit of a standstill because we were 6 siding boards short. Once we get those in, we should be able to finish what we planned to this winter in a fairly timely manner (that's the northwest side of the house). Then, we'll deal with our multi-colored house until we can start again in the spring.

While I worked on destroying things, my mom worked hard at cleaning them up, which is a pretty good parallel to life (we're just talking about cleaning here, don't get too deep). It actually did make a big difference.

This was not the before picture... it was a mid-way picture, so picture it much dirtier. Are you picturing it yet?


Here it is at the end of the day. Those specks are plaster dust, floating in the air.

My dad also worked on getting the plaster into a dumpster, as seen here:



Alok spent almost the whole day going to Lowes, Menards, and Home Depot and buying things we needed for the house.... and realizing he bought the wrong things for the house..... and returning the wrong things to the store for the house.... and getting back to the house and realizing things were missing. My mom heard him (badly) curse for about the 2nd time ever, so he wasn't terribly happy. He didn't let that ruin his day though and worked on helping clean up as well.

In the apartment news, well, it's just a freaking mess. Seriously. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, termites not only at through the hardwood floor, but through the original wood floors underneath and the floor joices. Here is the floor now (more had to get cut out):





The basement underneath the apartment area


Lovely view from below

There are also some additional holes in the original floor, as seen here:


Although, I think that small hole is the least of our worries. I was very upset to have them ruined, but when termites are hungry, there isn't much you can do. Just a quick reminder, the apartment was the area that we thought was totally liveable and we could move into right away. Moldy floor, nasty pipes, moldy closet, termite damage, and a hidden staircase later, we obviously know that to not be true.

Lastly, we are debating what to do in the front parlor (aka the former men and sheep room). What do you think of the paneling? It is hard wood, but it is also paneling. We were going to keep it and my mom may threaten us with death if we tear anything else up, but the thought of leaving up paneling is disturbing. Suggestions?






That's all for today. After I get done grading about 3000 pages of papers tomorrow (literally), I will continue my destruction.

Jessica