Deconstruction

Here is a blast of offensive images - I never realized just how bad it looked in there until it was all stripped down and captured by the unflinching camera eye. Nothing really too worthy of comment here…they showed up Monday and began destructifying.

These are of the small patch of linoleum in the entryway - that will get gone too, hopefully soon.

And then the fun began. There was amazing quantities of concrete everywhere in the bathroom - affixing the tile to the floors and to the walls, and in addition there was this wire mesh everywhere, apparently to support all that concrete. Our bathroom probably lost about 1200 pounds last week. Here are a few shots of the undoing process, and the resulting mess.

As you may have noticed, we had them go ahead and remove the tub too. We had considered keeping it because it had some interesting ‘antique’ detailing around the edge, but we decided that after the abuse it had taken (not to mention being in the same room with the demo) it would be better to start completely from scratch. As I watched Cameron standing inside the tub fanatically bludgeoning it with a sledgehammer I resolved to try my best not to make him mad.

Apparently, as shown below, there was some pretty major leaks in the bathroom at some point, as a good portion of the subfloor was rotted away. I kept waiting for Justin or Cameron to wind up in the crawlspace, especially when they were trying to haul out the cast iron tub. Speaking of leaks there was a bit of a panic when one of the pipes under the house ruptured from all the jostling, and there was water spraying out into the crawlspace for several minutes. The bat signal was raised, and Rick arrived shortly thereafter to cap those lines.

It was a little cold in that part of the house in the middle of the week, especially considering that there was no ceiling and there were gaping holes in the floor down into the crawlspace. I sure hope all the spiders appreciated us rolling out the welcome mat for them.

By the end of the week we were partially buried in snow, and I have a feeling that had something to do with the work slowing down. We were hoping the plumbing would get done last week, but by Friday all that had been completed was the demo (a smashing success), rebuilding the subfloor, roughing in the electrical, and insulating the ceiling and exterior walls.

Everything went pretty smoothly except that there didn’t really seem to be a plan for Kyle (the electrician) - he showed up essentially asking where I wanted evertyhing. My first shot at electrical design, I hope I did OK.

Bonus Photos
A few pictures of our fortress of solitude. The neighbors seemed a bit confused when they saw me outside in my Superman costume snapping these pics, but I just couldn’t resist.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 2:46 pm and is filed under During. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.