Demolition's done!

Three weekends of work, and our living room and dining rooms are both gutted down to bare studs and joists. We've even removed a wall, joining the two smaller rooms into one larger room, getting over a foot more floor space. (it was a thick wall!)

I've got a bunch of pictures... 342 raw pictures so far - and at the moment it's just too much to dig through and get posted in the gallery. I did find two that are very representative of the change we've seen in less than a month... one before the work started, and another as of tonight:

Before:


After:

If you don't believe that the pictures are the same view, notice the white radiator on the right side of each picture. Same radiator. Also notice in the "before", the chimney is behind the vacuum cleaner in the background. On the floor in the "after" is the shadow of the wall that we removed, which thankfully was not load-bearing, and was quite thick! As you can see, even with bare walls, it really opens up the space! On the left of the "after" picture is the first of two plastic walls which seals the first floor from the second, to keep all of our stuff up there from getting covered in dust.

We're really excited, although immediately, the most exciting part was having the demo area clean enough to unseal the kitchen. Previously, in order to go to the kitchen, we had to walk out the front door, around to the back of the house, then into the kitchen. With the recent winter storm, that's even less entertaining than it had been. The other night, Grace was hungry but almost decided against dinner just because she didn't want to go outside.

Until I get more pictures posted, I offer you this demolition video:

I realized that hammers and wonderbars just weren't fast enough, and since we didn't need to be fancy (it's demolition, after all) I grabbed a fiberglass sledgehammer handle (just the handle) and used it as a big lever to forcibly rip the plaster, lath, and drywall off the wall. Here you can see me rip up several layers at once. You can also see the dusty, dusty mess it created. Grace washed our clothes *every* night.

Thanks for reading, hopefully I'll have the pictures and more soon!