Electrical demolition

This past weekend's major project was working on the electrical. I decided to keep it simple and just redo everything. I've got some pictures up in the gallery.

New name for the blog...

"Atomic Dog" was just a name I came up with because it was a play on a friend's "Radioactive Cat" blog. Since Grace and I have been watching a ton of "This Old House" lately, decided to rename it to "Our Old House".

A new toy for the project!

New tools are always fun. When we were working on repainting the outside of the house later last year, we discovered the window frame was rotted and wound up replacing a whole section of wall. One thing I learned was how to recreate a window frame. I managed it pretty well with the tools we had, but couldn't help but think that I could have done a better job with a router.

Enter... the router. Not cheap, but really a very, very versatile tool, and with four windows needing to be reframed, it's becoming more and more a necessity. Plus, we'll be able to use it again on many other projects in the future! Thanks to Kelley Nelson for pointing me to CPO Bosch which sells factory refurbished Bosch power tools. Got my router for about $50 less than retail, and it's still got a full warranty.

A router alone is pretty useless - you need the bits. Stopped at the Lowes, and individual bits were over $30! My mom and dad, always a great resource for woodworking and houseworking info, pointed me to MLCS, who had a really nice 33 bit kit for only $99! $3 a bit or over $30... and these are bits my folks have been using for a couple years now. Yeah. Hard call there.

Still alive...

Yeah, we're still here and we're still working on the house. Haven't had much chance to do any updates. I have uploaded pictures of the demolition to the gallery, and did some commenting. Also split up the gallery into major subprojects so it didn't get too many pictures all in one gallery.

A video that works...

I posted a link to a resized video yesterday that didn't work for anyone. Google video is way easier, so I swapped that out. If you had trouble viewing the video, scroll down to yesterday's post.

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!

I feel dirty...

I feel dirty, and it's not just because we've spent the past three weekends demolishing the house. No, I finally broke down and got a blog. "blog", short for "weblog", which, being a system administrator, I always thought was what webservers use to log server access. But no, it's this trendy thing where anyone can post their thoughts on anything and everything, whether it's useful or not.

Whatever.

My use for it will be to document our home remodeling projects, in more detail than I've used in emails. Remains to be seen if this works out, but since it's free, I figured why not.