Monday Demo

Yeah, yeah, I know, my titles are starting to lack a certain creativity. At least there are posts now though :).

This is the work Andrea and I did Monday the 21st. Again, just a couple hours. We cleaned up some of the debris from Sunday, now that I remembered the wheelbarrow. The big item of the day though was tearing out the carpet and ceiling in the basement.

The carpet came out rather easily. I cut it into four sections. It was thin with no pad or glue, so that was helpful. Unfortunately, there was a small section of glued-down vinyl floor under the carpet. This I left for now, until I can get something to remove the glue.

The ceiling in the cellar was moldy in places, and bowed. As I tore it out I discovered the reason for both - the mold was especially curious as there shouldn't be any water or water pipes in that section.

It turns out, the waving was not from water damage, but a bad installation. The supports for the house were very roughly milled, as we noticed when planning the supports for under the kitchen. To compensate, when they finished the basement they installed strips of wood to try to even it out. However, these were small and nailed in rather than screwed in, and spaced too far apart - they couldn't hold the weight of the drywall over time. Given the low ceiling, I am considering leaving the beams open, as they don't look too bad. I'll also take a level to it and see if it's possible to hang drywall directly on the beams - we would gain a couple inches from tearing out the useless wood strips.

As for the mold - well, in one section a whole ton of mouse droppings came down with the drywall. I'd imagine mice were the source of the moisture for that mold... yuck!

Because the installation wasn't sturdy, the drywall came down quickly. The only area which had plaster was the stairway. I found the best way to approach this was to get a decent size hole in the ceiling, and then use my pry bar to pull the drywall away. I will go through and take out the rest of the wood slats later. In this section there was no plaster left on the slats - I imagine it got shaken down over time between the vibrations from impact on the stairs above, and the installation of the drywall.

All in all, as with the other demo, it seems with this house demo is actually already an improvement over what was there :).