Demo = Exhaustion

Removing the wall between the kitchen and dining room

We’ve demo’d lots of houses before, but typically one room at a time.  Tackling an entire house is a big challenge!  Thankfully we have the Waterhouse Builders team tackling the front porch.  But Richard and I got to demo the inside (true confessions, Richard did the majority of the heavy lifting!).  It's dirty, exhausting work - but a necessary first step to updating this tired old house.  

There was some good news.  As we ripped out countless acoustic tiles, no rodent droppings or skeletons rained down on us (which has happened to us in other houses – could it be due to the unusually large cat population in the neighborhood?).  And the weather was unusually mild as we dragged everything across the front yard into the dumpster.

Everything seems to lean at a different angle on the porch!

But there were some surprises as well.  And you guessed it - they all cost more money!

1) We knew the front porch dipped and swayed, turns out, there weren’t any footings at all.  The porch had to be totally removed and footings had to be installed.  And the bay window that projected out on the porch - the only thing holding it up was habit.

2)  We had hoped that after peeling back multiple layers of kitchen floor, we would find the original red beech flooring that is throughout the rest of the house.  Sadly, that wasn’t the case, just rough pine boards with some sort of linoleum glued over the center section.  Cha ching, cha ching!

Wires that were under the vinyl siding - not to code!!!

3)  We knew the house had knob and tube wiring that needed to be replaced.  But when we pulled back the vinyl siding on the back to replace the sliding door, we discovered newer wiring had been run right under the vinyl.  And nails had actually pierced the cable as they installed the vinyl.  Scary and amazing that it hadn’t started a fire at some point.

See the nail going right through the electrical cable???

The last surprise from the demo process, is how exhausted we are every night.  Sure, we knew this was a lifestyle change for us.  But we're in good shape, surely we can do a full day’s manual labor.  But Richard keeps keeps telling me there are 2 kinds of people in the world.  The kind that take a shower before they go to work in the morning and the kind that shower when they get home.  We’ve crossed to the other side!   No more sitting in front of a computer or in a conference room all day.  Surprise, surprise– for the first two weeks, we've dragged ourselves home each night, barely able to muster the energy to cook dinner.  Of course the good news is that being more active has helped us each lose 5 pounds!  Now we’ll see if we can keep it off.

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