Smash’em Bash’em Sunday

Guess what? We’ve been demolishing things! Whee! Enough with all the sanding and painting and fixing — we woke up Sunday morning wanting to destroy something. So we did.

We started by removing every bit of furniture from the dining room. Not an easy task because it was serving as both the living room and my office. And storage for IKEA goods we’d purchased for the guest bedroom. Annnnd we usually ate dinner on the couch, so it was still functioning as a living room at the same time.

After the room was empty, we took our official before shots:

That’s the doorway that leads to the kitchen. The hole in the wall is a recent addition.

We’re having an old-school wood-burning fireplace installed this weekend, and that hole is where it will connect to the chimney. Our chimney guy told us we’d be better off demolishing the room before the fireplace is put in. The thing is pretty massive and it’ll be hard to work around. Plus we don’t want to risk damaging the chimney or the fireplace.

Soak it all in, peeps. The burgundy carpet. The seafoam green crown molding. The ceiling tiles. That fan. It’s all got to go.

One of the walls features a window waaaaay over on one corner. Another window to balance it out would have been nice. But we’re working with what we’ve got.

There are 3 doors on another wall:

From L to R: the basement door, the door that leads to the front of the house (and upstairs), and the living room door.

And then there’s the window wall:

The door in the middle leads out to the porch and back yard. When we viewed the house before deciding to buy it, we didn’t see any of the crusty features of the house.

It’s like we had blinders on and could only see the cool features, like the 130-year-old solid wood doors, with their skeleton keys:

Still totally charmed by those! Not so charmed by stuff like this:

We’re not really sure what happened in this corner but the molding and the floral border doesn’t line up. At all. And, in case you didn’t notice, it’s hideous. That molding, by the way, is not original. It’s a later addition, and it’s painted the most atrocious shade of grandma green. At least it matches the floral border though, right? Right?? (We’ve been dreaming of ripping it out and smashing it to bits with a sledgehammer.)

Then there’s the ceiling:

We’re not huge fans of fans, but we do plan on having 3 ceilings fans in the house (in the dining room, guest bedroom and master bedroom). We’ll need them to help circulate heat from the fireplace and to keep us cool in the summer. We decided to not have air conditioners in the house. Even when it’s 90 degrees outside, our house stays pretty cool in the summer. We do have a window unit, but it sat in the garage all summer and we didn’t miss it. Added bonus: our electricity bill averages $35 a month now! Squee! But I digress…

We’re having ceiling fans, but not that ceiling fan. It’s outta here. The ceiling tile is also gone-zo.

We have some patching up to do in some spots, like the place where the radiator pipe meets the ceiling:

You can see right up into the guest bedroom through that hole.

We plan on stripping the paint off of the radiator and leaving it bare. But radiators aren’t exactly pretty to look at, so we’re making covers for all of the units in the house. That way they won’t collect dust and we don’t have to maintain a paint job. Low maintenance living!

We have a few wall warts to rip out — ugly, unnecessary wall fixtures like phone jacks for land lines. We haven’t had a landline in 7 years and we’ve survived.

And we have 2 original windows that need to be replaced. It’s starting to get cold outside, so our single-panes look like this most of the time:

The room isn’t insulated at all and has 2 walls that face outside, so we have our work cut out for us. But first, we have to demo.

We sealed off the doors that lead to the living room (currently our bedroom), the stairs and the kitchen with thick plastic sheeting:

Then we gently pried off the original molding. We want to preserve the original stuff just in case we can use it in other parts of the house.

Behind the molding, we found a big gap between the floor and the wall. Stuffed inside was some old-school insulation:

Newspaper! We carefully unfolded the delicate pieces of paper and looked for a date:

December 12, 1932 — the newspaper is nearly 80 years old.

We were pretty geeked. This confirmed what we’d suspected for a while — the “new” part of the house was added on in the 1930s. That includes the kitchen, both bathrooms, laundry room and office. The original house was already 50 years old at the time. Crazy!

Once the molding was off, it was time to get serious. Our plan for the day:

• Expose the big brick wall
• Tear down the ceiling to expose the rafters
• Remove all the carpet from the room

Did we mention we had less than 8 hours to get all of it done? Annnnnnd we were off:

This is the same brick wall that we exposed upstairs in the hallway and office, so we knew the brick would be in good condition. It came off pretty easily:

We didn’t bother covering up the carpet because we knew we’d just roll it up and throw it away at the end of the day. It made things so much easier.

The only downside to the jackhammer is that it’s insanely loud. We waited till 11:30am to get started so our neighbors wouldn’t hate us. I was also worried about how Jabba the Mutt would react to the noise since she was hanging out in the next room. This is what I found when I went to check in on her:

She was curled up on the couch, napping right through the jackhammering. What a trooper.

After de-plastering the wall, Bradley showed me how to take down the ceiling tiles (just yank on ‘em on a little):

That hole wasn’t always there. Bradley punched it out to see what was behind the tiles. No shocker there: it’s lathe and plaster. I took over tile removal while Bradley “fixed” the doorway:

Just like the doorway upstairs, we wanted to get rid of the wood frame and have exposed brick sides:

And, just like upstairs, we have a neato header sitting above the door.

Those scars are chop marks from an axe. And the wood is so old that it’s turned grey — we love how a little bit of natural wood color peeks out from the scars. It adds a lovely bit of texture and dimension to the room.

We salvaged the original trim and the planks from the doorway just in case we want to use them later.

We already have big plans for the planks — they’re going to be reborn as nightstands for the guest bedroom! We’ll post the step-by-step on that when we get to it. But, rest assured, that pile of wood will eventually look mega-fabulous.

After all the tiles were out, it was time to pry the furring strips out:

The furring strips were nailed to the original lathe & plaster ceiling and the tiles were stapled right on top. After that, things got a little dusty:

We’ve demo’d our fair share of lathe and plaster walls, but never a ceiling. This was, by far, the dustiest job we’ve done in the house so far.

Bradley tore down the ceiling while I bagged debris. We learned a lot from our last big demo upstairs, so this time around, things were surprisingly fast. Everything seemed pretty under control, and then this happened:

A rogue lathe strip fell from the ceiling and crashed right through our single-pane window. The funny thing is that this was moments after I told Bradley not to break a window.

Me: “I’m gonna go outside and eat a sandwich. Don’t break any windows.”
Bradley: “Yes, honey, duuuuuh, of coooourse I won’t break any windows.”

Moments later, glass smashed inches from my turkey breast on whole wheat:

Mistakes: we make ‘em, too. The only difference is that we taunt each other mercilessly about them for at least a week afterwards.

We finished up everything — carpet removal and all — at 9pm on Sunday night. We were too exhausted to take after pictures. Plus it was too dark and dusty anyway. So we decided to wait a few days and let the dust settle before we did that. Those pictures are coming up later today. Get excited peeps. We are!

—

What we learned:

We actually learned what not to do from our demo upstairs. So this time we had it down to a science. Here’s how we streamlined the demo and cleanup process and got it all done in one day:

• Leave the carpet till last. We took out the carpet before we demolished upstairs. If we had left it in, we could have just rolled up the dust with the carpet and tossed it all out at once.
• Bag the plaster, not the lathe strips. The wood has nails in it and they poke through the bags.
• Sort the lathe strips into 2 sizes: long and short. Bind the piles together using twine. Stack the bundles together like firewood.
• Use shovels, not dustpans, to gather up the smaller debris and dump it into bags.
• Cut the carpet into strips and then roll it up instead of rolling it all up in one piece. Bind each roll with twine. Waaay easier to carry.
• Cut the carpet from the bottom instead of the top. Your knife won’t snag.

Our brick wall is done!

Over the past month, we’ve been picking at our brick wall like a four-year-old picks at scabs. Bit by bit, we’re determined to get the plaster off and the beautiful red brick completely exposed. When we left off, the wall looked like this:

The Smurf room is completely exposed now, as is the flipside of the wall. And we removed all of the wood in the doorway to expose even more brick. The only thing left to expose is the little bit of brick surrounding the doorway.

So, bright and early on Saturday morning, I grabbed a hammer, a prybar and a jackhammer and got to work. I removed the plaster up to eye level before my arms felt like they would fall off. Then Bradley took over the jackhammer and finished off the rest. And now our brick wall looks like this:

We also removed the plaster and lathe from the adjoining wall so we could insulate it. You can see the nekkid wall behind the broom.

See that little bit of light creeping in above the window? That’s from a massive gap in the wood and brick on the outside of the house. Eeps! Foam insulation to the rescue!

We sealed around the entire window, and once it dried, we brought out the fiber insulation:

And we followed that up with styrofoam insulation:

The Smurf room, guest bedroom and bathroom are all sealed up. Now the hallway is getting there, too. By the time we’re done (next weekend, maybe??), this little corner of our house is going to be sealed up so tight that we’ll be sweating bullets in winter. Or, at the very least, we won’t freeze our hineys off.

We love the way the raw doorway looks now that it’s exposed on 3 sides. We need to put drywall on the ceiling outside the Smurf room, and then we can put up drywall on top of that metallic styrofoam insulation. Right now it’s hard to walk by it without getting blinding by the reflection.

Not too shabby, right? We still need to add another coat of mud to our seams and screwholes, and then it’s painting time!

So that’s it for our brick wall! It’s done. Lets never speak of it again.

I kid, I kid. We’re done exposing brick in this house. …for a couple of months, anyway. There’s one huge wall in the kitchen that we’ll expose, but we won’t get to that room for a while.

What we learned from our brick exposin’ adventure:

• Nothing. We learned absolutely nothing from this weekend’s de-plastering job. We’ve done this over and over again for weeks now, and we feel like we could expose brick in our sleep. Seriously.

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:

Source

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.