Well it has been several months since I have been on here to update everything.  And, besides a few smaller things I decided to put off, demolition has been completed and dumpsters have been filled and hauled off!

Every time you tell someone you are working on demolition or tearing down walls, etc. they respond with “Oh, that’s the fun part.”  To which I respond well then why don’t you come do it for me because I think it’s awful.  The few people I did get to come help soon changed their tune however.  Demolition is dusty, dirty, itchy, hazardous, and grueling work, when people think about it they just think about destroying stuff and not all the things that go along with it.  First of all make sure you look for the presence of asbestos in the house and get things tested if you’re not sure.  Also I would recommend an updated tetanus shot since you will probably get stabbed by a dozen nails a day.

The house we bought was built pre-1900’s so our goal was to keep as much of the original stuff as was possible and reasonable.  There are several reasons for this such as: 

• Old plaster walls are waaay better than drywall in terms of quality, strength, and insulative properties.
• Pre-WW2 wood is much more dense than modern wood because it comes from older trees where the fibers had much more time to be compressed before the trees were cut.
• The custom woodwork inside and oustide of the house is beautiful and gives tons of character and value to the building.
• And most importantly, why waste the time and money doing something that doesn’t need done (A.K.A. – If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it)!

Thankfully, the bank hired people to remove most of the trash from inside the place, so that did not need to be done.  The first thing to do though was get all the fixtures out so I could properly get to the walls, floors, and bones.

• Cabinets and counters were pretty straightforward, unhook and pull out any sinks and plumbing so we don’t break good pipes then take a big ass sledge hammer and smash everything out.
• Toilets are also very simple, most of the bolts were too rusty so I just smashed the porcelain from around the bolt and then you can take the toilet out and slide the bolts right out without unscrewing them at all.
• Tubs I did not actually have to remove.  There was only one tub in the house and it was in good shape.  Tubs I have removed past homes have been a pain though.  I found the easiest way to get them out of tight areas was to break them down into smaller pieces.  With fiberglass tubs I just took a Sawzall to them and cut them right in half.  With porcelain I just smashed them then picked up the pieces.  Cast Iron…. good luck, never had to remove one of these suckers you’ll probably need a few good buddies and some patience.
• Showers were a mixed basket.  The easy one was just a surround and some glass doors.  I first unscrewed the faucets to avoid breaking any plumbing then I took a hammer and a pry-bar and just ripped everything off the wall.  Then I unhooked the drain and pulled up the shower pan.  The other shower was a tile shower built into the walls.  For this one I just had to take a sledge hammer and large pry bar and go to work.  It took quite awhile but I was able to eventually smash all the tile and mortar off the walls and pull down the metal lathe behind.  Then i had to clear away all of this debris before I could get to the pan.  It was extremely heavy so I loaded just a few shovel loads at a time into a plastic garbage can and then hauled it outside.  Then for the pan much of the same thing, just started smashing and shoveling the tile and mortar until things got light enough were I could pick up the rubber liner and after cutting and breaking it way from the drain haul it outside as well.
  
• Radiators probably could have been left but they were only installed in half of the downstairs rooms and none of the upstairs.  Also they are huge and heavy and take up too much room.  We decided to go with forced air so these needed to be removed.  Most of these I was just able to unscrew from the plumbing with big wrenches.  A couple i had to use a Sawzall with a nice strong metal cutting blade to cut through the cast iron pipes.  Once disconnected I used all my might to slowly slide them a couple feet away from the wall so I had room to work.  These things are unbelievably heavy and I would probably need 3-4 helpers to move the big ones.  They are still sitting where I left them, but the plan is to put them up on Craigslist with a “You Haul” notice and see if we have any takers because they are worth some good money even if just for scrap!  For the plumbing I just took my Sawzall and cut them wherever necessary to be able to slide them through the holes in the floor and drag them outside.  Since I have no electric I was using a battery-powered Sawzall which means I was only able to make a few cuts before killing a battery.  I had 2 batteries so over several weeks I would just start out by making a few more cuts then go onto other tasks for the rest of the day.

Now that we had a nice empty house we decided to start with plaster removal since that seemed the biggest task and that way we could hopefully pull some of the dust out with the flooring when we removed that.  The downstairs walls in most rooms had plaster that was in good shape or could be easily repaired and the same was true for a couple rooms upstairs.  All the ceilings were bad though and most rooms upstairs were extremely nasty and so I decided to just pull those walls down too.

There is no other way to phrase the task of plaster removal other than horrible!  It is extremely dusty and dirty and the stuff is hard to remove and weighs a ton.  Make sure you have some good quality dust masks, old clothes, gloves, and some eye protection.  We had bought some nice goggles to use for this but since we were doing it in the winter months I found my goggles instantly fogged up so that I couldn’t see.  I ended up doing most rooms with no googles and usually ended the day with some pretty bloodshot eyes : /.

Our first plan was to just remove the plaster and leave the wood lathe and just put the new drywall over the lathe.  After doing a couple walls this way I soon found it was easier to just remove the lathe too.  The easiest way I found to remove the plaster walls and ceiling was to punch a hole all the way through and then just start pounding the lathe slats out from the backside.  The lathe is fairly easy to pound off especially if the plaster is already loose and the plaster will just fall off with it.  We spent several Saturdays going room by room removing all of the bad ceilings and walls this way, except for upstairs ceilings.

For the upstairs ceilings I got up there and figured I’d just remove them the same way as the downstairs ones.  I did this with two rooms and found this to be an unbearable task.  Since the attic was above these ceilings they were packed with insulation.  And this isn’t the rolled sheets of paper lined insulation you might be thinking off.  This was old cellulose insulation, basically just a loose fill insulation poured in between the joists:

So every time I pulled some lathe down insulation rained down on me and insulation dust filled the air!  Within minutes I was covered in insulation and itchy and my eyes were hurting so bad I could barely keep them open.  I tried to wear goggles but a lot of that insulation still made it through and the goggles fogged up so bad I couldn’t see what I was doing.  There was a brief time in my life that I worked in a fiberglass factory that made fiberglass Semi-truck cabs.  Where I worked was filled with fiberglass dust from grinding, drilling, and sanding these parts and every day when I left it felt like there were little needles stuck all over my body and like someone had rubbed my eyes down with sandpaper.  And the stuff sticks in your pores so you can’t wash it off, a cold shower helps, but basically you just have to wait for it to all come out on it’s own then it’s time to go back to work : /.  Anyways this was like that all over again!

What I did with the rest of the rooms upstairs was decided to leave the lathe in place.  For removing just plaster I tried a bunch of different methods but what I found worked best was the following:

• Take a hammer and just pound all over in a large area.  You want to pound hard enough to break and loosen the plaster but you don’t want to break the lathe below.
• Take a pointed shovel and just start shoving it between the lathe and now loosed plaster.  Just keep sliding and prying.
• Once you get to a spot where prying with the shovel gets hard again take the hammer and do some more pounding.
• The looser the plaster is the easier it will come off, I found some ceilings I was able to do almost with no hammering at all, it just came right off.  Others I had to hammer the hell out of them to break off every little piece : /

At this point we had a giant pile of cabinets and random stuff in the yard and house that had a layer of plaster and lathe (and in some rooms loose fill insulation) a foot or more thick on every floor.  We figured it was dumpster time.  We called and ordered the biggest dumpster the local company had which was a 30 yd, 5 ton container.  Then we sent a message out to all our friends and asked for help the weekend it was to be delivered and offered gas money, pizza, and drinks.  I thought maybe a 3-day weekend would be good so I went with Easter weekend, but my friends seemed not too fond of this haha. 

The weekend came and on Friday I was all alone so I just started moving everything I could out into the yard.  Then on Saturday a few of our friends stopped out and we began hauling plaster.  I bought a bunch of light snow shovels and 30 gallon trash cans and we split into two groups.  One group would stay in the rooms and fill cans while the other would haul the cans to the dumpster and bring them back.  The hauling group split itself into a chain so that one person was hauling them down and some others would haul them further and dump them.  In filling the cans we either filled each one with lathe or with plaster (and insulation).  The lathe didn’t shovel well so that had to be picked up by hand and stuck into a bin laying on its side.  For the plaster that could be shoveled very nicely with the snow shovels once the big pieces of lathe were out of the way.  We could only place about 5 shovel fulls of plaster in the garbage bins filling them about 1/4 the way up because any more than that and they started to get very challenging to lift.

We continued this throughout the day, rotating positions, losing people and occasionally adding a few.  By mid-afternoon we had filled the dumpster to the top and in a desire to get the plaster out while I had the manpower just started dumping plaster in the yard beside the dumpster.  By the end of the day we finished all but 2 rooms, which I decided was good enough because we were all getting pretty tired, itchy, and gross by that time.  We called it quits and I called on Monday to have the dumpster picked up and another brought.  The first dumpster contained mostly plaster mess and there was still a giant pile of cabinets, toilets and such in the yard as well as the pile of plaster and the 2 rooms inside.  That first dumpster weighed 7.5 tons!

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The next couple weekends I came back alone but didn’t have the new dumpster yet, so I finished hauling out the remaining rooms into the pile and pulled out the carpeting in the few rooms that had it.  After that I used a pointed shovel to pry up the many layers of linoleum and luon in the kitchens and threw those in the pile too.  Then I got the second dumpster and began shoveling the plaster and such in.  I put the carpet in first so the plaster would smash it down.  About mid-way through the day my wife got off work and came to help me shovel.  We got all the remaining plaster shoveled in and then got almost the entire pile of cabinets and such thrown in as well (what would fit).  The few remaining things we left in the pile in the yard knowing there would be more anyways.  The second dumpster weighted 9.5 tons!  So we removed 17 tons of stuff at this point!

Next the only things left were a couple walls I wanted to remove and just a few random things here and there.  For the walls I just cut the studs in half with my Sawzall then pulled them right out.  I then went through the house several times pulling up random stuff that I missed and throwing them into the pile.  This random stuff included things like:

• Light Fixtures
• Dryer Ducts
• Duct-work from the upstairs forced air furnace (that heated 3 rooms?)
• A Wall mounted furnace
• Hot water tanks – Placed into the garage to sell later
• The furnaces – Also placed in the garage to sell
• Moldings in any room I removed the walls in – I tried to take these off delicately using a hammer from behind the wall and a putty knife to get behind them when I couldn’t do that but many still broke.  I saved the ones I could so I could reuse them.

Finally one of my least favorite tasks was about completed and I was left with a very dirty, but blank slate (as least as blank as I wanted it).  I would need to get one more dumpster to put the rest of the stuff in and then the next task up is electric.  Once I get the electric in I can start cleaning up and actually start making things look good!  As you will see in my upcoming post though something came up that is going to cause us to take a few month hiatus in our schedule…. But at least we were able to complete demolition and when we pick back up the tasks should be a little more enjoyable : ).