If I Had a Hammer...

It's been a quiet month on the renovation front apparently, judging from the lack of posts here in this renovation blog.

And that's the truth.

It's not that I've been a negligent blogger, its just that there hasn't been any movement on the renovation front. None.  Nowhere.  Nothing.

I brought in another concrete contractor for pricing, but he's as bad as my commercial guys - not that they're bad contractors, just that they can't get a revised quotation to us because right now the entire industry is so busy that the piling sub-contractors are that far behind on their quotes, and it runs all the way back up to us.

So I don't have any new pictures of concrete removal or drilling or giant earth moving machines to share.

But since it was a long weekend here this past weekend, we decided that we'd take advantage of that extra day and begin some interior demolition just because.  Because it will need to get done eventually.  And because we're going to be the ones doing it then, we may as well do it now when we're not under the time pressures we will most certainly be facing down the road.

So I called my demo guy and asked if he had a trailer for me to use on Saturday.  He said sure, and he'd drop it off first thing.

He even dropped off his van in case we had so much stuff that a trip to the dump would be in order. (it wasn't, but it was a nice idea all the same.)  Note the step stool, it came in handy for getting large items into the trailer - it was either that or we''d have huge HeMan-like thighs after a day of high-stepping the debris into the trailer.

Neither one of us is fond of the Hulk-like ripping of pants, so we stayed with the step stool.

Today's demo would be some stuff that had been accumulating in the yard since fall, and some actual, honest to goodness construction related demo! Finally!  Our target was the front room. Here are the befores:

Here's a shot of the boy helping for a very brief moment before going out to catch a movie with a friend - he was disappointed that he was going to miss knocking holes in walls, so we let him get a few shots in while he could.  We assured him there would be plenty of time and opportunity as this project gets going for him to hone his hammer-smashing skills.

It's always a bonus to have constructed the walls you are attempting to remove: you know what's in them and how they were built (hopefully!) In this case, I knew where the electrical was run for the lights and switches, and how the gas line for the fireplace entered the base of the platform, so it was a fairly easy job to shut those services off and then remove them piece by piece before true demo began.

The fireplace wall was first.

Then the small walls that separated the front room from the dining room - I had originally built these two thin walls to allow for 2 sliding doors to close off the dining room. Yeah, that never happened.  After we got the walls up we waffled about the doors. That and we never could find exactly the type of doors we both wanted, but that's another story for another day.

Here's the dining room walls going out:

Yes, that's K knocking down that wall. No, she's not naked.  Though that would put a whole new spin on the home remodelling show craze on tv, now wouldn't it? No, she'd work for a bit then hit the pool to cool off, then continue.  Smart woman that one.

And the after shot from the front room looking back toward the piano wall:

Just a little bit more open.

While I had been disconnecting electrical and gas lines, and knocking down the fireplace wall, K was cleaning off the built-in cabinet on the west wall. We figured we may as well take out one section of it while we had the van and trailer, since the new entry addition would require a doorway into the existing house where that first section of built-in sat. 

Now I know for some of you, the thought of demolishing storage cabinetry is akin to sin, and you're probably going to leave comments suggesting we have our heads examined for wrecking perfectly good custom built-in cabinets.  But before you sharpen the sticks and light the torches,  please remember that I built those cabinets myself back when the boy was still crawling, and while they could have lived out a long and useful life, they have no future in the new plans, and served us faithfully while we used them.  

I wondered how the boy was going to react when he came back from the movies and saw part of the cabinets gone.

He was surprised, and commented on not knowing the front room without those cabinets being there, but he was interested in how they came out and when he could help get the rest of them out.  He wasn't as interested about the mold we found behind this one cabinet though:

Nothing a little bleach couldn't fix.

And with that, we swept up and wiped down the first layer of settling dust, closed up the trailer and poured a couple rum and cokes and hit the pool.  No need to kill ourselves just yet.  Baby steps, remember?

Next time? Hopefully we'll have pictures of big earth moving machines and major drilling tools and mud and mess and stuff like that.  

Or not. Whatever.  We'll get there when we get there.

This is like a road trip; the more you slow down and enjoy the stuff along the way, the more memories and insights you'll discover.  

Like that your house will seem more open and huge than you remember, if you knock down walls that you put up a few years earlier and rediscover the expanse of space that was hiding in plain sight.