Tag: demolition

Madness & Mayhem

Looking through a hole in the wall to the other side of the house.

So, Loyal Reader, thank you for asking for more pictures of the demolition. I guess you (yes, this is a plural “you”), really like HGTV. And, obviously, blood and guts.

And good for y’all that The Spouse and I have both been taking photos pretty much every day at the site. It used to be our home, but, as you know, it barely resembles that. So in it’s current ravaged state, it’s the site.

Our amazing neighbor, who is truly one of the kindest and open people I have met in my life and I am so glad that they and their family are our friends, lives behind our site. I brought The Beast to frolic with theirs. “Your house is brown! What are you doing?”

Nope. It’s just been denuded of the siding. It will be blue once again. I replied.

So, let’s take a look at where we are. While disturbing–to me–these pics are all rated G. Descriptions included.

The Windows

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The back of the house. Please note the insane hole above the window. Look at the upper right corner. That’s what happens after a hundred years. I wonder if that’s where the hornet’s nest was? I thought it was lower.
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The window on the east side of the house. I like this shot. Makes the house look impressive.

From The Back Yard

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Just so’s you know, this entire sequence was done in about ten days. They told us the demo goes fast. They did not speak untruths.

The Infrastructure

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The cracked and stressed wood at the East Bay window.
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The stairs to the basement have no introduction. No wall. No door. Just a drop. Careful!
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Where the old pocket doors pocketed themselves. We were hoping that their remains were still there. No luck. But the mechanisms are cool, like a barn door.
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The Carp’s ladder leads to the upstairs. The new design will take advantage of all the light that streams from above. Like a chorus of angels encircled by a heavenly aurora.
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The radiators all pulled from it’s plumbing and piled up for later reinstallation. I love how the radiator heat makes the house so cozy. And no hot air blowing around and giving me chapped lips and flakey, scaley shins. Radiators are where it’s at.

The Upstairs

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The upstairs dormer didn’t have any sheathing behind the siding. It was drywall, blown-in insulation and siding. Geez!
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Looking up where the stairwell was and will be. The nakedness will be clothed in new ductwork that will provide heating upstairs and cooling on both levels. They call it central air conditioning. Who knew that there were such modern technologies to make life better. Next thing you know, they’ll have machines that wash dishes. Oh. Wait. Other people have had these “dish washers?” Makes my skill set here rather redundant. YAY!
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This is the window where the new bathroom will be. Crazy that we never had a bathroom upstairs before. The door to the bathroom will have a frosted glass door to let the light tumble through to the stairwell. I’m going to order stickers for the door. Either WC or, maybe, just W.

The End

That’s all for today. I have some cool demo-porn pics for tomorrow. Or when I get to it. I know, I know, the Doc is such a tease.

And, by the way, thank you, Loyal Reader, for playing along. It helps me to share, and I need a recipient. You complete me.

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All Falls Down

The toilet has been excavated and moved into the Big Guy's bedroom. And there's no plaster left on the walls.

It was brutally hot last week. Hot to the tune of breaking the 100°F mark. Not the kind of days that I’d want to pull plaster and drywall down. Not especially since the first task was to shut off the water and electricity. I hope they had one outlet active. For a fan.

Putting my key in my front door gave a false sense of norm. When I opened the door, it was the anti-Oz. Instead of Dorothy walking from gray into technicolor, I walked from a green summer day into a monochromatic world. The slats on the walls, the wood that the plaster adhered to, reminded me more of a historic National Park Service site than my house. I almost looked for one of these shiny NPS trifolds that would tell me how people used to live–back in the day.

From the front door looking back past the demolished bathroom in the back.

Each day I’d visit my house and more of it would be missing. There were sections of the dining room wall peeled away. The next day there were bags piled in a corner of the room formerly known as our bedroom. The upstairs was drywall and the first floor plaster. The drywall was a lot easier to pull down. They did that first.

The converted attic looks more attic than converted. Beyond the posts was our bedroom.

You could see patches of daylight where the roof joined the walls so the house could breathe. The new foam insulation won’t require that. But this day it was hard to breathe with all the loosened and stirred up particles swirling around and around in the updraft of hot air. I went back downstairs.

The dining room looking into the kitchen. They’re protecting the millwork.

Another day or so later I could barely get up the stairs. The bottom step was missing and piles of the remains of fluffy blown-in insulation that fell between where the wall used to be had to be climbed. The insulation had fallen because part of the wall that held it was now gone.

Looking from The Big Guy’s room through the office to the “den.”

It was both familiar and strange, but nothing was as strange as seeing the toilet in The Big Guy’s bedroom. It sat there, lonely, in the middle of the room, hooked up to nothing and surrounded by the naked wooden lath stripped of its plaster. The room was a poetic shambles with the commode looking as if it was gently placed there by a twister that viciously and randomly passed through.

The tiles were pulled off the remaining bathroom wall. The next day, from The Big Guy’s room, standing next to the toilet, you could see all the way through to the outside kitchen wall where a secret window that had been plastered over when the cabinets were hung during an update in the 1930’s or 40’s was revealed.

Never saw this wall paper before. It was behind the hideous paneling. Hope to stop with the hideous moving forward.

It was coming down.

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Demo Derby

The demolition plan for the kitchen area.

I asked the team to bring the updated plans. I just had the kitchen elevations in hard copy. Nothing else.

“Elevations” is part of my new vocabulary. See how I just threw that out there, as if it wasn’t a term that I learned three weeks ago? It’s amazing how quickly you can assimilate new language. For those of you not fluent in whale, in this context, elevations are the wall view of the plans, versus the flyover view. The elevations show the relative height of the cabinets, where the tops of the windows line up and how the microwave stacks over the wall oven.

I don’t know the name of the top-down plans. Floor plans? I think that’s right.

I did have some of the drawings electronically. I like them that way because I can pull them up on my phone, tablet and laptop. I can zoom in on specific features. I don’t like the pixelated versions in that I have a hard time getting the overall and relative picture. So I requested the printouts.

The printed plans are oversized. You can run your finger along the outside wall, rather than hiding half of the room behind a stubby digit. You can trace the new door opening while standing in the as-is room and squinting to see the future. You can hold the page an arm’s length away, below where the new wall of windows will be, and still make out the details in the drawing and pretend your other hand is resting on the new kitchen island.

My printer can’t print to that size of paper. The architect’s printer can. They printed out everything that was updated, and there were bonus pages. There were drawings with circles with little points–some with the points exiting one side and some with the points spread around the circle like a compass. The circles were linked together with bowed lines. These were the electrical drawings.

There was a color-coded set with red numbers and green numbers that corresponded to the color of the kitchen cabinets. There was a framing plan that was unfathomable to me. These documents made me very happy that I hired someone who understands them.

There were also two pages that had the current floor plan. This was awesome because they lined up with the to-be plans so I could get a better relative idea the changes.

On closer inspection, it dawned on me that the as-is plans are not there for my comparative pleasure. I saw shaded areas that, according to the legend, are areas marked for demolition. Whoa! Demolition. That’s a serious word.

The shady spots are along a few walls where doors or closets are moving. There’s a few spots where the floor is coming up and being replaced by tile. And there’s the back three-quarters of the house marked for wrecking. The kitchen, the pantry and the bathroom, and the wall that encases the stairway–all with X’s marking the spots where they will be razed and remade.

And reused and recycled, too. There are a bunch of notes in the margin instructing the contractors to carefully remove and replace boards and trim.

I like that demolition and destruction are on the same page as care and reclamation. I like the contradiction and the compliment, the yin yang of it all. I’m finding meaning in everything.

 

Posted on by docthink 0