Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Farmhouse Demo Days - Knock Down Those Walls!!

Demo day is always exciting!!!  Now that we have a go forward plan, we can get started tearing out some walls.  This isn’t a complete gut job, but we still have a fair amount of work to do and we're anticipating several days of demo.

The biggest challenge is getting the chimneys down.  I had hoped to convert the woodstove/chimney in the master bedroom into a wood burning fireplace or a gas insert.  But sadly, after talking with a couple of masons, I discovered it is no longer up to building code requirements and it can’t be converted  (the good news is we will be adding a gas fireplace in the living room). The other chimney is for the old boiler - which will be replaced with a gas, wall mounted boiler.

We are removing 3 major walls and they will be ‘stripped’ of plaster and lath, until the carpenters can put the new beams in. 




















And as always, we're saving everything we can for Habitat for Humanity's ReStore, so they can get a new home.
















And look at the difference!!!!  This is after the first phase, when they pulled off all the old plaster - leaving the lath in place for phase 2.













Okay, so it still looks a bit cluttered with the studs in place, but you can already get a feel for how much the floor plan will open up.
View towards Dining Room & Front Porch - Before
View towards Dining Room & Front Porch - After Demo
One of the things I'm most excited about is seeing the 'view' from the front door as you enter the house.  Look at the difference already!

Of course we've had some surprises....like all these plumbing connections where we want to open up the wall.
Yikes - we want to open up this wall!  That's a lot of plumbing!
And there is knob and tube wiring everywhere - which appears to be disconnected, but we need our electrician to come verify for us.

And there are things that make us smile - like this mixture of old wood that was used on this wall!  Yankee thriftiness shows up in every house!


Upstairs, we didn't make a lot of changes, except for the bathroom.

We've gutted it, but have discovered a few structural/plumbing challenges to our plan.  While we wait for the structural evaluation, we're on hold for this go forward plan!

And what happened to all the materials we pulled out of the house?  Well we donated everything we could.  Including the toilet and the kitchen sink :-)

Donation day!!!
What's next?  Well now we need to start putting it back together again!



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1 comment:

  1. Wow, it starts out so fast doesn't it? How exciting. I hope that you don't have to wait too long before the structural evaluation comes in.

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