demolition
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| Kitchen demo |
Demolition, at its core, can be a fun thing. You take a hammer and a crowbar, and where applicable, you just start swinging.
Fun.
The reality of it is a bit more... shall we say, nuanced, than that.
In reality, you are demolishing things because they are too old to belong, they're wrong, or they just aren't part of the plan going forward. And then, AS you demolish them, you find stuff. Sometimes it's neat, like an old baseball in the wall or bits of bottle labels from the 30's and 40's.
Sometimes, it's bad!
Like a nail driven straight through the wiring in your kitchen. Or drywall on the ceiling, which was attached to metal beams that were then attached to plaster, which was adhered to lathing, which for some reason was hiding the only live knob and tube wiring in the house.
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| Half-bath and (new) pantry demo |
Better yet, maybe you're demolishing the drywall hiding the chimney upstairs because you want to expose the brick. And as you're going through the demo on this, you realize that what you THOUGHT had been old water damage, that you noticed the first time you looked at the house but figured was old, and that when you looked at the house for your final inspection realized "hey, neat, they patched the water damage and painted it!" was actually ACTIVE water damage that the kids (I say 'kids' loosely as they're all in their 60's and 70's) just hid.
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| Water damage |
A month after buying the house, you are now taking out an unplanned loan for an additional $36,000 so that you can replace your roof, your gutters, your soffits, and fascia.
Surprise! Home-ownership! Yay, demo!
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| Roof demo |
Just three weeks into owning The Estate, that was how the cookie crumbled. On the one hand, it was devastating because it was adding a pretty large monthly payment for me that I had not anticipated (though it was very much necessary and required). On the other hand, it was cool because that meant I had a new roof that wasn't a mossy-stained grey but was black, and I could replace all of that metalwork with thick, bold, black trim. It fits into the aesthetic I was going for; maybe a few years before I figured I would have to go for it, but all the same.
That part was neat.
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| Balcony demo |
Demolition continued on the roof, and what was supposed to be a balcony on the front of the house was never actually built to support a balcony. So that needed to be redesigned, and again, that's a perk of demolition. While it's not always fun and grand, it can also open up possibilities for what is to come. You learn how to pivot when you find the things you don't like, and you learn how to adapt to a change you perhaps didn't anticipate but ultimately appreciate.
Anyway, let's talk.
It should be noted as to the reason why the house was updated in 1983 so substantially. The family had a pretty horrible accident Christmas night, where the Franklin Stove in the parlor ended up setting the attic on fire (chimney issue), and with that, the entire upstairs of the house was burned out. Nobody was injured, but it meant a couple things for the house:
- The entire upstairs was completely gutted and reconfigured into different rooms when it was rebuilt.
- They never did anything about some of the smoke damage (I have).
- The original back porch of the house was removed, and a massive addition was built in its place (basement included) that would create the lower-ceilinged part of the kitchen and the laundry room.
- All original trim and doors on the second floor were lost.
- The original trim in the downstairs bedroom (my office) and the adjoining bathroom were lost.
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| Laundry room demo |
Demolition on the house lasted a SOLID three weeks, but in reality, it was on and off for two months (as work would shift to repairing ready areas). Keep in mind, by the way, I was not living in the house right away; I was staying with my parents.
And also, for the record, this wasn't a "drop everything in life and work on the house" sort of thing, either. I still had (have) a full-time job, so housework was EXTRA work for Seanny.
I'd typically wake up around 5am, get my coffee, and sit at my desk where I'd do my work as a technical writer for a software development firm. My parents would leave the house around 10am, heading to The Estate to begin work, and then I'd be there by 2:30/3pm when my day wrapped. We'd touch-base, maybe work in tandem for an hour, and then they would head home. I would stay, sometimes until 6, other times 8, and work.
In those early days, it was hard to stay late because it would get too dark to see, and there weren't many lights in the house. So you'd really just... do what you could do. In the beginning, it started with carpet removal. Apart from the upstairs bathroom, the laundry room, and 2/3 of the kitchen, the entire house was carpeted. That includes the two bathrooms downstairs.
Carpeted.
Old carpet.
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| Parlor demo |
Do you know what happens to carpet when it reaches 60 years old? Or rather, do you know what happens to the carpet pad underneath it? With all that foot traffic, and spills, and whatever else you can imagine, it essentially turns into like... paste, against the floors. And you don't pull it away from the floor, so much as you peel and scrape it off.
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| Living room demo |
All that being said, the floors arguably went the fastest. For the most part, the carpet just yeeted itself away from the floor, and upstairs, it was a cinch. The hardest part was the stairwell, where my father toiled away for a few hours because there were like... tac-strips on top of tac-strips (the little pieces of wood with nails sticking out that hold the carpet down), and each stair step and riser were a separate piece of carpet. It was a nightmare for him, and he was a trouper.
Which, lemme side-bar here.
My parents? Amazing.
They worked TiReLeSsLy for two months on my house, helping me with anything and everything they reasonably could. The carpet removal, plaster smashing and lathe pulling, the clean up (the constant cleanup), my mom specifically for first spending days on end pulling staples and nails from the original hardwood floors AND the stairs, and then spending days with a chemical stripper, getting rid of the 120-year-old shellac so that I could rent (for a second time) a giant floor sander to refinish the floors. Then my dad, specifically, for dealing with what probably sounded like insane ideas for lighting configurations and having to figure out the wiring for that, building entire walls of cabinets in the kitchen to match the ones I had ordered, framing in the insanity that was the half-bath and would become a half-bath/pantry (two rooms), building a closet where a weird stairwell had been that wasn't original to the house, and for just... all the things.
All the tips and tricks and knowledge that he could give me.
And for not yelling at me when I was in a snippy mood, which eventually became an everyday thing.
So mom and dad, if you're reading this (I know you are), thanks.
You're neat.
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| Primary bedroom demo |
As I said, though, upstairs, the carpet came out easily. This is the primary bedroom, which I would LATER (as in a month ago) find out had been an upstairs living room. Hence the asbestos tiling (OH, on that note, the floor in the kitchen actually was not asbestos, which was great and enabled us to pull it all up).
Upstairs, different story.
Because of the fire in the 80s and the room being reconfigured, there were definite issues with the floor upstairs. Apart from the house being pretty unlevel in general, that is. The original floors had largely been replaced with OSB boards (those sheets of wood that have all sorts of small pieces of wood glued together), there was the asbestos tiling in a couple rooms, and then the back bedroom that was just all over the place.
So later, if you're asking yourself why I carpeted the entire upstairs, now you know.
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| Guest Bedroom demo |
When the floors were done, I turned toward wallpaper removal. I'll say right now that I didn't move in the best path for most of the house, as in I did things in an order that could have been better. I was nervous about the delay in getting the carpet installed, so instead of like... getting all the painting done and trim installed while the floors were gross-looking, I foolishly (only in that I had to be extra careful) had the carpet put in well WELL before any paint would go on the walls.
Still, upstairs was primarily wallpaper removal, carpet removal, and, of course, every single trim piece.
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| Stairwell demo 1 |
However.
There was the stairwell, which is currently an ongoing battle of wills, but we will start with this (which is now done). At the top of the stairs, the family had installed a door, probably in the 50s or 60s. This could have been for two reasons:
First, when the family bought the home in 1952, the entire upstairs was an apartment. This explains the tiling in the upstairs "living room," as well as the stairs in the backroom that led down to the side of the house and straight out to a concrete porch on the driveway (said stairwell is now the aforementioned closet).
Second, this family loved to entertain, but with 7 kids, the children sometimes had to go to bed when the fun was ragin'. So, a door to cut off the noise is helpful. I lean less into this theory, but that doesn't matter because the door is gone.
I then broke down the framing, making it the ample open space it used to be. Several months later, in the fall, I continued my assault on the stairwell.
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| Stairwell demo 2 |
When standing outside, I thought it was odd that an entire portion of the house seemed to be "walled up" above the stairwell. That was valuable space that could be reclaimed, but I wasn't sure what condition it would be. This picture was taken after two things happened.
First, I poked a hole in the wall of my closet and shoved a fiber-optic camera through it to see.
I couldn't see.
So then I punched a 6-inch wide hole in the wall so I could shove my phone through; ta-da, the angled ceiling had been added in the 60s as well and had been present during the fire in the 80s (note the smoke damage on the right side). I cut the hole to be the size I wanted because, though you can't see it, there is a stained glass window in my bedroom closet, HIDDEN, and I want it visible from the stairs.
Secondly, I removed the entire ceiling above the stairs, which is why there is an angled green wall on the left and a (torn-up) angled wall on the right. Beyond that, everything you see on the walls and ceiling is all original wallpaper from when the house was built, which is pretty awesome, but it's in terrible shape (tissue paper thin, ripped, cracking, etc).
This project is ongoing, so I won't have any photos of progress later. But it'll be super nifty when it's done, I promise.
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| Study demo |
Back downstairs, only a few rooms had wallpaper, and it practically fell off the walls. This room was actually the primary suite because of the two closets inside and the full bathroom attached, but it would become my office (or, to be fancy, "the study") in due time. This room was the only one downstairs drastically affected by the fire (water damage) and had been redone entirely.
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| Bathroom demo |
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| Kitchen demo |
Circling back to the kitchen, this room underwent the most dramatic transformation in the house. Apart from just two walls (an outer wall with the bay window and the wall separating the laundry room,) every surface had the sheetrock torn down. This was mainly due to the electrical issues in the kitchen and a lack of support for the new appliances I would be putting in (specifically, the induction range and the new oven/microwave combo). On the only wall that still had original trim (the basement doorframe and the doorframe for the half-bath (now pantry)), the sheetrock had been applied directly to the plaster and lathe, which meant the wall was flush with the trim (rather than the trim "protruding" from the wall, as it should).
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| The dumpster |
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