Almost Done with Demo

The fun with demo continues.  We are on day 10 today.  Some parts go quickly, like the carpets in this room, and others not so quickly, like the carpet tack board thingys that I learned how to use a flat blade shovel to remove.  Eventually you realize it's time to go get food and sleep because you have lost your sense of reason.  For instance, I realized I should have just moved the seed starts instead of working around them.  That was my clue that day.  Other days have been less obvious.  

Somehow the act of just hanging out in the yard and on the porch is exhausting for the dogs.  They no longer harass us when we sit down to stare at the tv.  They snore loudly and can barely be awakened to go outside before we go upstairs to sleep.  

We continue to discover all kinds of evidence of past interesting construction decisions.  Often these are electrical.  Which makes us really happy that the electrician is coming on Monday to rewire the entire house.  Even he commented on the wiring.  

Most of the past 10 days I have battled with this room.  It will become the room where I put my piano and my sewing machine.  It fought the demo process the entire way.  Most of the sheetrock came off in pieces smaller than my fist.  Except for a giant chunk of the ceiling.  Which fought back by dropping some crap in my eye.  Possibly literally.  There were some serious mouse nests in the insulation.  

When I finished that room I got to suit up as my other persona, the insulation removal queen.  Insulation sucks to work with.  It's glass.  Which means it itches like crazy when it gets into your skin.  Which it does.  Even with my special white suit.  

While I was battling my room, Chad had his own special room across the hall.  Different range of problems there.  This room will become an office.  There was no insulation in the exterior walls.  And the short wall there?  Yeah, it wasn't really a wall.  No connection beyond superficial to the ceiling.  But it had lots of electrical special choices represented.  And three layers of wall coverings.  So we were moving at about the same speed.  And it was disheartening.  

We made it upstairs about five days later than planned.  And found some treasures in the crawl space above the arctic entry.  He examined all the paint and stuff and most of it went out to the dumpster.  

Every now and then we find a reminder of the era that the house was constructed during and we hypothesize about how some plywood from the local air force base ended up as subflooring.  

And then I would go back downstairs and do some more battle with my room.  

And so would Chad.  Every little bit helps.  That's my mantra.  Along with some sailor swearing.  Mostly Chad stared in disbelief.  

Last weekend we got a little hand up.  Three boys in their 20s can do a lot of destruction while you are away for a half hour getting pizza.  The local pizza place has been around for 50 years.  Which is saying a lot for here.  And it's delicious.  Glad the boys brought their own beer.  

It took us most of the next 5 days to get it to this state upstairs.  We're now on our third dumpster.  We still have some flooring to pull up and a little more demo in places like the arctic entry.    Did I mention the discovery of eight layers of flooring upstairs?  We have about half pulled out so far.   

Little spaces like closets can really be fun.  Especially when you realize that they were added after some of the layers of flooring or walls or who knows.  This is the closet under the stairs in my special room.  I might have karate kicked the plywood on this wall.  It was gratifying.  

At some point the privacy in the bathroom during demo goes way down.  Don't worry, he's just washing his hands.  

The bathroom gets a partial facelift now and some more later.  My current mission is to find an 18 x 36 window to replace the special existing one.  It's not a standard size (none of ours are) but we can't really change this one.  

We sleep like dead rocks every night.  It's mentally exhausting to keep reformulating the plan.  I'm looking forward to the electrician work so I can start to think about the yard.  I think I will start with the front.  It's tiny.  And there's no electrical or fence work to wait on.