The ugliest room in our house.

We’ve publicly shared some pretty hideous features of our house on Bye Bye Brooklyn. No shame in our game. Our house has 130 years of history in its walls, and some pretty crappy design decisions were made along the way. We’re not worried. The house has really good bones, and it’ll be fabulous in no time.

Still, there is one room that grosses us out so badly that we seriously considering not sharing the before pictures. For the sake of keeping it real, though, we have to document the crustiest of the crusty.

Deep breath. Here we go:

This is the back door to our house, which is actually the door we use most often. It leads out to our back yard and garage, and leads in to the kitchen.

This room’s main purpose at the moment is for sunbathing:

That’s Jabba. She’s not much of a DIYer, but she’s a professional napper. While we’re upstairs demolishing rooms, she’s downstairs sunbathing and snoozing. Or interrupting to remind us it’s lunchtime:

She hangs out in the entryway a lot because it gets great sunlight through its super-ghetto windows:

Someone repaired that glass with clear packing tape. You can hardly see the crack, right? Right??

We’ve also been using this room as a place to store our recycling:

Our bike locks and helmets were thrown in here as well:

The windows overlook the ugly trellis that we’ll be ripping down:

And, in case you hadn’t noticed, there are no walls. Whoever renovated this room (and I’m using the word “renovated” very loosely), did a pretty terrible job of insulating. Everything is sort of crunched in and mushed down (total no-no), and they never got around to sheetrocking the walls. Or the ceiling:

One cool thing about this room is the exposed brick that’s been painted white:

Here it is on the other wall:

Oh, wait, I’m sorry. That’s not brick. Those are shingles. As in, the stuff that’s supposed to go on the outside of your house. The entire wall is covered with shingles that were painted white to “match” the brick:

All of those black spots you see on the shingles are places where we pulled out nails. The dorm fridge is what we lived out of before we got our shiny new fridge. Not gonna lie: that was a rough couple of weeks. You can also take a gander at our washer & dryer hookup.

We’ve been excited about having a laundry room pretty much since we started looking at houses to buy. We daydreamed about living the kind of life where we could wash our clothes while watching a movie. Throw our wash in the dryer without navigating through screaming kids running laps around the laundromat. Leave our laundry in the dryer overnight. And — oh, bliss — never ever again having to wear bathing suit bottoms as underwear because we’ve been too busy to drag our hampers across the street to the stupid, noisy laundromat.

Anyway, on the shingled wall, you can see a poorly sealed doorway (and even more nails):

Apparently this room was once connected to our half-bathroom, which was also recently “renovated.” It’s nowhere near as horrible as the laundry room, but it’s not pretty either. We’re guessing this space used to be an outdoor porch, and someone converted it into a half-bath and laundry room. And they did a pretty horrible job of it. To seal up the doorway, for instance, they just nailed a piece of plywood to the frame, painted it white, and called it a day.

There is one thing we plan on keeping from this room:

Bradley’s pretty indifferent about it, but I kind of love that faceplate. Can’t you see it painted bronze and looking really fabulous in another room? It’s one of those just-so-weird-it-might-work things that we’re going to try, and if it doesn’t work, then in the trash it goes.

We also found a thermometer in the room:

The Royal Order of Moose? Garbage.

Ugly light? Garbage.

Wait, no, we take that back. This might be salvageable. Capiz shell is all the rage right now, and with new fittings for the inside and a better way to hang it — a way that doesn’t include a cheap brass chain — we might make this work. Maybe. If we’re not totally smash-happy by the time we start renovating this room, in which case, it’ll probably die a horrible sledgehammer-related death.

We’re not really ready to renovate this room yet (we have a one-room-at-a-time policy), but we needed to get that stained carpet out. Luckily, this was a poorly done DIY job. It’s a theme in this room. So we didn’t have to rip up any carpet tacks or deal with any glue. Someone just used a stapler to staple the carpet to the wood. And we’re not sure they used a real staple gun. They looked like normal office staples. Moral of the story: people are weird.

The carpet came up easily, and underneath, we found a perfect preserved  Jackson Pollock painting!

Upon closer examination, though, we found that this was not a Pollock but a cheap knock-off by Scott:

Oh well. You can’t win ‘em all. Or, apparently, you can’t win at all with this room.

…just kidding! When it comes down to it, it’s still a laundry room. And a useable one now that we put a washer and dryer in it:

Whee! When I snapped that picture, those puppies were hooked up and doing one of the four loads of laundry we did that day. No bathing suit bottoms up in this hizzy!

We initially planned on buying new front loaders, but since we decided to splurge on kitchen appliances, we cut back on our laundry room budget. After reading a lot of reviews, we decided that maybe front loaders weren’t that great for us. I’m extremely allergic to mold. We’re sure other people are having great mold-free results with their front loaders, but we’re not going to risk it.

After looking at a lot of top loaders, we decided to buy a used set off of Craigslist.  So many people are getting rid of their 2 or 3-year-old top loaders in order to buy new front loaders. There are tons of deals to be had, plus buying used keeps perfectly-good machines out of landfills. By going to Craigslist, we were able to be both eco-conscious and budget-conscious.

How budget-conscious? Drumroll please! We got our machines for……$150 each! $300 for the set — and there’s nothing at all wrong with ‘em. We’d actually given ourselves a much-higher budget of $1200, so we technically saved ourselves $900.

As far as renovating this room goes, it’s pretty low on our list right now. But we’re already talking about doing a very light, airy look for both this room and the adjoining half-bathroom. Something modern but beachy. We’re taking our cues from the white brick wall and thinking white paneled walls and minimalist cabinetry. We’re also planning on keeping the floors light — either white or light grey — to contrast with the black floors throughout the house.

And, while we know there’s no room in our half-bath for a claw foot tub, we think this works beautifully:

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No rush. We’ll get to it when we get to it. For now, we’re sticking to the upstairs renovations. But we’re super excited that we can do our laundry while we’re working on the rest of the house. Or watching movies. Or going out for dinner. Or sleeping…

What we learned from this project:

• We don’t know who Scott is, but we want to have a long talk with him.
• Everyone’s jumping on the front loader bandwagon, which is great for the rest of us who don’t mind an energy efficient machine that’s a couple of years old. Check Craigslist!

Say goodbye to the Smurf room!

The Smurf room may be tiny in comparison to our other bedrooms, but we have big, big plans for it. And, like a lot of our plans lately, it involves demolition.

We woke up early on Saturday morning and removed all of the trim from the room. We labeled it “Smurf” so we could find and reuse it later.

The room is roughly 8.5 feet wide by 15.5 feet long, and the ceilings are just over 7.5 feet short tall. There are 3 windows in the room, and they’re all super old, single-pane suckers that need to be replaced.

Here’s how the room looks from all 4 corners, starting with me standing in the doorway and working clockwise:

From in front of the closet:

From the radiator corner:

And the last corner across from the doorway:

The flooring is newer (and in better shape) than the rest of the house, and the room gets a ton of sunlight. Plus we can see some big hills / small mountains off the distance.

It’s not a bad room. Just kinda tiny.

The short ceilings certainly don’t help.

Neither does the color scheme. It just makes the room look really squat. Still, we decided it would be great for an office. And with a pullout couch, it could easily double as a guest bedroom.

Bradley had another Saturday-morning project going on in the guest bedroom (more on that soon!), so he handed me the crowbar and sledgehammer and told me to go to town. I had some aggression to work out.

You see, earlier that morning, Bradley ran into our very sweet, very old and very pig-headed old-fashioned neighbor, who chastised him for “making” me move heavy furniture across our yard. Bradley told him that I wanted to move furniture because I haven’t been getting enough gym time lately and have been complaining about not getting a decent workout. Our neighbor replied, “They weren’t built for physical labor.” And by “they,” he didn’t mean sassy bloggers.

I made 2 demands when I found out: 1) that we go sign up for a gym membership immediately so I can get my guns ready for some sleeveless flaunting all up in our neighbor’s face, and 2) that I get to smash something. I also told him I was going to blog about our neighbor because he’s 100 years old and probably doesn’t read blogs. So, neighbor, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for stereotyping you.

Anyway, on to the smashing and bashing. When I removed the trim, I found a couple of surprises in the wall:

A valentine (awwww!) and a hunk of bee hive (ewwww!). Luckily there seemed to be no sign of bees, so I kept smashing walls until I was too tired to lift the sledgehammer:

That’s when Bradley dropped by and took over. We had to move a radiator to get to the wall behind it. Here he is demonstrating how not to pick up something that weighs a bajillion pounds:

I asked him to pose for a radiator-lifting picture and that’s what I got. Come on, Bradley, rules are in place for a reason. Lift with your legs, not with your back. Don’t lock your knees. Look both ways before crossing the street. I before E, except after C. No white after Labor Day. Rules rule!

We haven’t decided what to do about the closet door at this point. In fact, we’re not even really sure whether we want the closet to be a closet. Our bathroom is right next to the closet — you can see the plumbing for our bathtub through the hideous hole the wall. We’re not renovating the bathroom for a while, but we could use the closet space to expand into it. We could kill 2 birds with 1 stone: remove an awkwardly shaped closet and add a considerable amount of space to the tiny bathroom.

If we do decide to keep it as storage for the office, we can always install some shelves. We also talked about designing and making our own sliding door for it. We already plan to make a sliding door for the main entrance to the room, so we could make a second one to match and hang that for the closet door. There will be a long desk that goes between the closet doorway and the main doorway. The desk will be designed to accommodate the sliding door (or doors) behind it.

Told you. Big, big plans for this little room. For now, we know we have to insulate the two outward-facing walls in the closet regardless, so we have time to plan out our next move.

When we ripped out the plaster and lathe around the window frames, we found weights hanging on the inside:

There was one weight on each side of each window, so 6 weights altogether.

Plus several other weights at the bottom. The ropes must have ripped off or the windows must have been replaced.

They’re rusted and covered in dust right now, but we think they’re really neat looking. We’re saving them to reuse somewhere — maybe in a sculpture.

A very heavy sculpture. Each weight is 6 pounds. We have 11 weights so far and we’ll find at least 10 more weights in the house from the other old windows.

We made a rule recently that limits the amount of hours we work on the house on weekends. We start right after breakfast — around 9:30 — and work until 6PM. At 6:00 on the dot, it’s pencils jackhammers down. Our self-imposed cutoff is so that we take time to relax a little on weekends. Both of us have full-time jobs and work at least 10 or 11 hours a day. When it comes to working on the house, we have a tendency to go go go until bedtime.

Between our long work hours, our 2 days a week spent in Brooklyn, and all of our renovating, we could easily burn ourselves out. We’ve got a long way to go, baby! We don’t have time to burn out! So we set up a strict deadline, and after 6PM, it’s all hot showers, BBQ grills, beers and Netflix. This way we can keep up the energy and excitement we need to keep on renovating.

At the 5:30 on Saturday, we had demolished the entire Smurf room, but we hadn’t gotten into the closet yet. And we had 14 contractor garbage bags full of plaster and lathe from the 2 walls we ripped down. Each 32-gallon bag weighed over 100 pounds:

Everywhere we turned there was a giant bag full of old walls staring us in the face:

I was so beat from an entire day of swinging a sledgehammer that I wanted to leave the bags overnight. I’m not sure how Bradley mustered up the energy, but while I took care of sweeping up the room, he carried every single one of those bags down stairs and out to the garage.

Mah hero! Mah poor, passed-out hero!

The next morning, we woke up and went back in for more demolition. The plaster and lathe were all gone, leaving behind only some studs and boards that separated us from the exterior brick.

It’s hard to imagine how people lived in this house without any insulation. I can understand it 130 years ago, but people were living here last year. They must have frozen their butts off every winter!

I spent my Sunday morning doing a pretty brainless task (the best kind of task to take on until the coffee kicks in!). I demolished the walls in the closet, creating 4 more bags of debris that had to be hauled downstairs. Meanwhile Bradley demolished another wall in the Smurf room:

That’s right: we exposed some more brick! We can’t help ourselves. It’s a culmination of all those years of living in apartments that had brick walls, but landlords who refused to set them free. Or maybe we just really, really love carrying 100-pound bags of plaster down stairs.

This is the flip side of the same brick wall we exposed in the hallway. It turns out there are actually 2 layers of brick. The brick on this side is in way better shape. We won’t have to do any re-pointing at all on this side! This is excellent news because we plan on exposing this same wall in the kitchen. This means less work for us! Squee!!

We were also pretty happy to see that the plaster is much, much thinner on the Smurf room side so it didn’t take a ton of work to get the brick exposed. Bradley used only a jackhammer for the entire wall — no hammer & chisel!

While Bradley jackhammered, I grabbed a regular hammer and moved on to brainless task #2. Every single stud in the room had about 30 nails in it:

That’s how the lathe strips (the wood strips from earlier photos) were attached to the studs. Lathe gets nailed to stud. Plaster gets smeared on lathe. Viola! Walls!

Bradley’s job was way more exciting than mine.

I kept offering to take over, but he really wanted to do this wall on his own. I think he secretly really wanted to expose the hallway brick, but he was too busy working on other projects and missed out on all that fun.

So I let him have his glory.

We finished at 6PM, and didn’t have any time left to clean up the rubble. Not that it mattered anyway. We were so beat from 2 days of demolition (sore shoulders, sore back, sore hands, sore arms, sore everything), that we couldn’t have cleaned up even if we wanted to. All we wanted to do is shower and go out for dinner before hitting the hay, so we didn’t even wait for the dust to settle before taking our in-progress pictures:

Isn’t it lovely?

Hazy, yes. But still very lovely.

We haven’t decided yet whether we will leave the brick raw or white-wash. I love the look of white washed brick. It looks so earthy, and much softer than red brick:

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The color palette for this room will be white, yellow and greys, so I think a white-washed wall will work better. Bradley’s not totally sold on it. We’ll probably rock-paper-scissors over it, but in the end, I’ll be spending much more time in this room than he will. So Leena crushes rock, paper, AND scissors. Just sayin’.

The rest of the walls are totally naked and ready for new windows, insulation and sheetrock.

No more wallpaper in the closet!

After taking these pictures, we used a sheet of plastic to completely seal up the doorway. There’s no door anymore, so this will help keep the dust confined until it settles. Next time, we’ll just vacuum it up and move along.

Still left to do in this room:

• Seal up cracks with spray foam insulation
• Insulate all of the naked walls
• Sheetrock (plus tape & mud)
• Replace windows
• Paint
• Sand floors
• Paint floors
• Replace trim
• Make and install a sliding door (or two?)
• Cry sweet tears of relief

It looks like a long list, but we’re getting there. Demolition always seems to take way longer than putting things back together, so we’re optimistic that this room will be done by the time our first set of visitors come out to see us (July 4th weekend…eep!).

What we learned in this project:

• Plaster is really, really heavy.
• Chuck Taylors: cute, comfortable, not meant for construction work. (Plaster is really, really heavy.)
• It takes approximately 4 weekends for us to create enough construction garbage to fill one standard dumpster.

Jackhammer? More like Jillhammer.

We showed up to our house and found every surface on the second floor covered in plaster dust. We weren’t kidding when we said this stuff gets everywhere. This time, we even found that plaster dust had somehow worked its way into our shoes, through our socks, and wedged itself between our toes. We also got a case of what we’ve started calling “plaster boogers.” And by “we” I mean only Bradley, because girls don’t get boogers.

We know that all we need to expose our brick is a prybar, a hammer and a pair of biceps, but we were dying to try out our jackhammer. We had to be careful because a jackhammer can pummel its way right through some brick, so we set it on the lowest possible setting. Bradley took it for a test drive:

It worked like a charm! So he handed the jackhammer over to me and gave me some basic instructions

• Don’t use too much pressure.
• Don’t use too little pressure.
• Don’t bust through the wall.

Then he went to go work on another project and left me all alone with the big, bad jackhammer. But first he snapped this pic:

What you can’t see is the huge smile on my face as I yell, “YEEEEEEEHAW!”

Don’t let the cockiness fool you. When I took over jackhammering duties, I was 99.9% sure that I would pee my pants once I flipped the switch on. But after several trips to the bathroom to make sure that wouldn’t happen, I channeled my inner Brutus-the-construction-worker and let ‘er rip.

I jackhammered straight into the plaster at a 90-degree angle until I broke through the paint. Then I angled the jackhammer down so I didn’t chip the brick. This loosened the plaster so it fell right off. I nicked a couple of bricks, but it was so minor that it’s not even noticeable. For the most part, the plaster came off without a problem. And I found out that jackhammers. are. awesome. Good thing, too, because we have a whole lotta brick wall to expose in the kitchen! It’s a dusty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

The best part about using the jackhammer was how fast the plaster came off the brick. I could loosen up an area with the jackhammer and then use my hand to knock down big sections of plaster instead of chipping away at small sections using the prybar & hammer method.

Also, because more of the plaster came off the wall intact, I found some more of the weird stuff they used to hold plaster together. There were a lot of dried (and surprisingly well-preserved) leaves in the mix. Those fell apart when I tried to remove them for photography purposes. Bew hew! There were also some acorns and nuts:

That one was perfectly intact and completely preserved under the plaster. If it wasn’t for the lead paint, I would have asked Bradley to taste test it for me.

I made it all the way up to the door frame using just the jackhammer and my hands, and then I ran into a little problem. See, I don’t trust our ladder. That thing has fallen on my head not once, but twice. And it’s super wobbly. I didn’t have anything but the ladder to brace myself while I applied pressure to the jackhammer, and I kept feeling like I was going to tip over. Eep! I played it safe and switched to the prybar & hammer to finish off the rest of the wall.

Eventually I had all of the plaster off of the wall and on the floor:

The cleanup — as usual — took way longer than the demolition, and in the end, we hauled 7 giant contractor bagfuls out to the garbage pile garage.

Little cheapskate tip for all you DIYers: buy your contractor bags from Costco. We got a giant box of 32 for $13. …right after we paid $8 for a tiny box of 12. Never again, Lowe’s. Never again!!

At one point, which trying to knock off a particularly stubborn piece of plaster, I banged my thumb with a hammer. Instead of sitting down and focusing on the pain, I decided to switch jobs and remove all of the “new” door frames off of the original frame. All of that white stuff under the door header is gone:

The sides still have some white paint on them, but all of the “new” door frames nailed onto the original wood doorway is removed. You can see the color of the original wood underneath:

We plan on sanding the door frame down and repainting it white to pop against the brick and the black floors (yes, we’ve finally settled on a color!).

After a whole lot of sweeping, vacuuming and dusting, we had a fully exposed brick wall:

It still needs some work. We have to wire brush it so all of the dust is off. We might have to repoint some brick where the mortar came loose. We also want to re-sheetrock the ceiling because we hate the raw edge where the ceiling meets the brick:

The wall that meets the brick on the right side is also pretty ragged looking:

We were already planning on sheetrocking it, so it’s no big deal. The wall with the French door was recently sheetrocked, and it looks so clean in comparison. It doesn’t have a corner bead on it yet, but Bradley’s cuts are pretty spot on:

This is the cleanest our floors have looked since we ripped up the carpet.

Sad, right? We’re dying to take a floor sander to it, but we’re waiting until after our painting is done. Anyway, it took a shop vac, a broom and a floor duster to get our floors so squeaky clean.

And it took one Bradley and one planer all of 20 seconds to screw up my clean floor goodness:

Without warning, Bradley opened up the French doors and started planing them down so they’d close a little easier.

Wood chips went flying all over, both in the hallway and in the guest bedroom. I cried, “Mah flooooors!” and vowed never to vacuum in this house again. Then I helped him hold the French doors open so he could sand them down and get them all smooth for painting. The drama never lasts long ’round our house. There’s too much work to do.

Spoiler alert: you can see the paint for our guest bedroom!

It’s a lovely shade of creamy tan. That’s all you’re getting out of us for now. We’re almost ready to paint, but until then, our lips are sealed. Mum’s the word. You’ll never take us alive, copper. Myah, see, myah! No talk of paint until our sanding’s done:

After Bradley finished sanding, we made one more change to the French doors. We haaaaated the way the original brass hardware looked.

So shiny and so…gold. They blinded us every time we opened the door. So we picked up some oil-rubbed bronze hardware from Lowe’s and made a quick swap:

Maybe it’s just because our new camera is way better than our crusty old point-and-shoot, but we think the before & afters are uh-may-zing:

We plan on painting the door black, so the hinges will basically disappear. Plus, matte black just feels so much better. We paid nearly $30 for the 6 hinges, so it wasn’t exactly a cheap fix. But we had a little money left over in our guest bedroom budget, so we went for it.

After cleaning up the floors — again! — we called it a day. We thought we deserved to relax a little with a brew or two:

Note the pile of plain white outlet covers that we’ll replace our not-so-pretty old outlets with. (Someday there won’t be a faux marble turquoise outlet in this house!) After our R&R, we called it a day and went out into the hall to take our final “in progress” photos. They’re not true “after” pictures because we still have some work to do, but the comparison is worth sharing. Prepare to ooh and aah. First up, our brick wall makeover:

And now our French door:

When we were packing up and leaving, we realized for the first time ever that you can actually see the brick wall from the front door.

And can we please talk about how sunny it is up there? The French door lets all the bedroom light through and everything just gleams. We love it!

What we learned from this project:

• Fingernails? Thumbnails? It’s almost as if they were made to be smashed by hammers.
• Plastic curtain goes up first with every demolition! We’ll never make that mistake again.
• A prybar and hammer work just fine, but a jackhammer gets the job done in half the time.

Feeling exposed.

Hey & welcome, new readers! We were so geeked to be Freshly Pressed — we did a happy dance and everything — and excited to have someone following our whole house renovation. Someone who isn’t related to us and thereby forced to read our DIY dorkiness, that is. We’re just getting started, so you joined us at the perfect time!

When we left off, we’d just finished installing our French doors. After that, we cleaned up the walls and got them ready to have new sheet rock attached.  That’s when we came across something that made us hyperventilate in our ventilator masks:

A brick wall tucked behind some wood and drywall! Technically we knew this was there from the day Bradley crawled around the space between the kitchen ceiling and the office floor. You can see it waaaaay back there in the picture he took using his Droid.

We planned on exposing this brick wall in the kitchen, but we didn’t really consider exposing it upstairs. Not until we saw it behind the wall, just begging to be let out. How cool would it be to walk up the stairs and see an exposed brick wall at the end of the hallway?

It didn’t take much to talk ourselves into it. We grabbed a crowbar and hammer and removed the molding around the door. Then we started chipping away the plaster in the hallway.

One of us would chisel while the other picked up the falling chunks of plaster and tossed them in a garbage bag. Then we’d trade positions to give the chiseler’s arms a break.

Bradley showed me a tuft of horsehair he found in the plaster:

Ignore the filthy hands. De-plastering’s a dirty job.

He told me they used horse hair to keep the plaster clumped together back in the day. Sure enough, when I looked through the plaster, there was horsehair everywhere. I asked him how he knows this stuff. He said, “I read up on it.” Keep in mind that this is coming from the same guy whose idea of a good beach read is this:

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We had to be careful to chisel only the plaster and not remove the mortar from between the bricks. For the most part, it came off easily in big chunks. Then we’d use the back of the hammer to loosen the more stubborn bits of plaster and use our (workgloved) hands to brush off the brick.

We were loving the raw look of the brick. It’ll totally modernize the space, but also give it a hint of old-school cool.

The raw, unfinished texture of brick isn’t really the first thing that comes to mind when you think of modern interiors.
A lot of people associate modern design with super slick, new walls with no texture or color. But we love it when a modern space has rough edges.

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The perfect balance of old and industrial mixed with sleek and shiny:

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And we love how old red brick looks with wood furniture:

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We were so excited to find that the brick-meets-wood look was already built into the house. When we exposed the area above the door frame, we found that the header was an old wood beam:

That thick block of wood supports the weight of the brick wall above the door frame. You can also see a bit of the original door frame underneath the beam. It’s turned grey with age, but it’s solid wood and it’s as old as the house is.

It needs a little cleaning, but the wood is beautifully preserved.

Sadly, we ran out of daylight before we finished exposing the entire wall. We wanted to finish the sheet rock in the hall before the day was over, so we switched projects halfway through.

We haven’t taped, plastered and painted our wall yet, but we already love the way the new wall butts up against the old brick wall.

We’ll be fully moved into the house in 9 days(!), and we’ll tackle the rest of the wall then. We have to expose the rest of the brick, move the smoke detector, clean the brick with a wire brush, wash the wall to get all the debris off, and get the door frame ready for painting.

When we’re done with that, we’ll have our very first before-and-after pictures for the blog! Get excited — we are!!

What we learned from our brick exposing project:

• Bradley would be the master of Trivial Pursuit’s Construction Edition.
• No jackhammer necessary — just a hammer & a small pry bar were enough to remove the plaster wall.
• Plaster dust blows. Literally. It blows everywhere. We forgot to hang up some plastic sheeting to keep the dust contained and now the second floor is covered in white dust. Oops!
• When exposing brick, wear a ventilator, long sleeves and a hat or hoodie. 3 shampoos later, I still feel like I have plaster in my hair.