It is done. After a week of much sweat, tears, and blood, it is done. Between the lead paint and asbestos, I’m sure to die according the CDC, right?

New tools list:

1. Small flat bar
2. Large flat bar
3. Paint scraper
4. Heat gun
5. Lead & asbestos respirator
6. Safety glasses

I wish I could say this is the last time I have to remove asbestos backed vinyl, however, both rooms upstairs have the vinyl tiles that will eventually be coming up. It was by far the most undesirable job I have ever done. I would rather strip 10 layers of latex paint, 5 layers of lead paint, and a layer of milk paint, and proceed to clean up the remnants, and finish by sanding, staining, and polying trim for a week than remove one bathroom floor’s asbestos linoleum. Especially when the said bathroom has the strongest heat vent in the entire house and you are wearing a respirator. Supposedly when you remove asbestos, you are supposed to spray it down with water to keep the dust down. I just lean my head over and douse it with sweat.

Starting a little more than a week ago, and enduring a terrible cold in the process, I removed all the shower tiles (new tool #1 + hammer), gutted the walls of drywall and plaster (new tools #2, #5 and #6), and stripped the entire floor of asbestos (I have to say that as much as possible to show how manly I was to tackle it, right?) linoleum (new tools #3, #4 and #5 + putty knife and gloves). After finishing this afternoon, I got my hair buzzed and took a shower. I’ve never felt better. What a glorious day!

Here is the floor from a couple angles (feel free to call it dirty names for being such a pain…):

Looking at the pictures, the darker spots are either discolorations (near the toilet drain), or linoleum backing that is in between the slightly raised grains in those locations. Both of which should hopefully be taken care of with a light sanding (which someone else gets to do!). The actual color variations between the boards is due to some still having their last finish, and others not having any finish left at all. I’m pretty certain this is shellac. From what I know about shellac, I should be able to wipe it away with denatured alcohol, and if it goes to unfinished wood, then it isn’t stained. Either way, I’m anxious to see the floor sanded and refinished. I’ve got my hopes set high.

Tomorrow morning, Casey is going to call the contractor who is going to fill in the floor and do the insulation/drywalling to let him know we are ready. When we talked to him last (Thursday), and we told him we’d be done by Monday, he seemed reluctant to believe us. Who’d blame him? The walls were still up and the floor still had linoleum on it. If it were a normal contractor, it’d probably take a couple weeks . We’re really hoping they can get in and either finish the floor or the walls by the end of the week.

To finish this off, I found one picture from several years ago before my father had actually renovated this exact bathroom showing the lovely tub (or the top of it) and the sink. The toilet was the same color in case you were curious:

Someday I hope to find the pictures I took of the initial walk through before they purchased it in 2002. Someday.

I almost wish I let someone else take out the plaster in the bathroom. Even though I knew it was in terrible shape, and that I didn’t have the time to fix it myself, nor the money to pay someone else at this time, I still hated the fact that I was pulling out 80 year old plaster and perfectly good lathe. While it will be nice to get the bathroom done the way we envisioned it before this water damage ordeal, if I had all the time in the world, I would have left the lathe on and replastered.

But since this is what I currently am showering in, I need to get this upstairs bathroom done as soon as possible:

Anywho, this is what the upstairs bathroom looks like as of this morning:

See those two holes on both sides ? Those are openings to the area under the roof behind the bedroom closets. Like all the rest of you lucky home owners that have opened that one spot that hasn’t seen the light of day since the house was built, I was hoping to find some momentos from the builders or original home owners.

This is the closet to the left:

And the closet to the right:

All I get is a Smörgåsbord of insulation… unfair? I think so. So instead, I’ll spend the rest of my day scraping away at the floor, removing the lovely asbestos vinyl flooring from our Douglas fir hardwood. I did stop by Ace Hardware the other day and picked up one of these though:

How does it look on Casey?

I also picked up a giant roll of duct tape and a plastic drop cloth to seal myself in with the fumes and asbestos dust. Hopefully that’ll make it so only I get cancer and not my wife and son.

One nice thing about demoing the room is we were able to see how parts of it were originally set up. There were two wall sconces (which we are looking for if you have any to sell ):

And we could see the outline of the original sink in the paint:

You can also see the line around the room where the original trim was half way up the wall:

With the fake plaster tile, do you think they would have done a wood trim piece, or actual tile?

Lastly, we had the contractor out here who is going to do the insulating, drywalling, and the floor come look at the bathroom floor for his input. He is from a local outfit (Simonsons Lumber) and he claims to have old growth, vertical grain Douglas fir on hand. While I would prefer salvaged, I don’t have the time nor the extra funds at the moment to justify it. I will be asking for a sample first to make sure I am comfortable it will match close enough.

We decided we wanted more of an “open floor plan” that is all the rage today. Cabinets, refrigerators, stoves, who needs those? They only get in the way, and provide places to stub your toes, or for mice to hide in. Kitchen sink? Naw, those just provide another place to leak. And who needs plaster or drywall when you can just look into the studs.

All joking aside, this is where the demolition folks left off. Ironically, an hour or so after I wrote about how uncomfortable I was with them doing it, I received a frantic message from Casey telling me they threw away the original window trim. As I sped home, I pondered where in the world I could find wood to replace it in the event I couldn’t find it in the dumpster. After I parked my car, I looked over the dumpster from the top. Full of wainscoting. No kitchen cabinets, or appliances. So, avoiding having to climb into it, I took a peek into our porch and garage. Luckily, they had actually saved it and put it into our porch. Phew…

As Casey had mentioned in her post about the roots and stairs, we had originally wondered if the rear entry had been in that back right corner in the above picture. However, it appears what my father had seen behind the plaster when he remodeled wasn’t the framing of a door, but a window:

We would consider putting a window back in there except for two things. The first is that the odds of finding a window that matches the rest are slim. The second is that we’d just be looking into our neighbor’s kitchen, so it wouldn’t give us much of a view.

However, I can give you the back story on why the window was closed up. When my parents first purchased the home, there actually was a standing shower right about in front of that closed up window. To the left was a pocket for a refrigerator. That little window was in a small bathroom that was accessed by the door on the right. There was also a small pedestal sink and toilet in there. I’m assuming it was added pre 1950, but I’m not certain. It had metal lathe, but it was still plaster. My parents took the bathroom out as the kitchen was simply much too small. The bad thing is that leaves us without a main floor bathroom, but I think we’ll live with it.

And in case you are wondering what that big thing on the bottom right is, it is an abatement system used to contain the lead dust. My office is directly through that door on the right and there isn’t a bit of dust on my monitors (which show every bit of dust imaginable). So far, so good.

I feel like I should be excited. Someone else is doing the dirty work of demolitioning our main floor kitchen (which was remodeled by the POs a few  years ago) and I have the “luxury” of sitting back, having a drink, and not getting my hands dirty. But I can’t seem to enjoy it. I’m constantly fretting about them damaging something they shouldn’t, or the fact that they are throwing a few year old cabinets (even though they are pretty badly damaged) into a dumpster when they could be pretty decent garage cabinets. Is this normal?

At this rate, I’m expecting the reconstruction phase to begin next week. Most likely the plumbing and electrical repairs.

While I’m grateful we aren’t having to pay out of pocket for this stuff, I just wish I had the time to do all the work myself, ensuring it is done right. It does help knowing that all the rooms that are being gutted are rooms that were all new (bathroom in the basement) or recently remodeled with new materials. If they were demoing an original room, I don’t know what I’d do. I’m queasy hearing that they removed our original trim. Did they do so without scratching, denting, or gouging it? I’ll find out when I get home from work tonight. I just wish I had the time last night to remove it all myself.

Does anything look wrong with this?

If you said that the garage looks to be leaning to the left, you win. I am going to guess a bit on the history of the garage. I’m thinking that it was built either at the same time as the house, or very soon after. The stalls are just big enough to get our two Pontiac Grand Ams into it, with about a foot of space all around them. It probably would have fit a car built around or before 1928 with no problem at all. However, to us, it is beyond usable. We are most likely going to tear it down.

I rather despise having to destroy or tear down original items to the property, but, as I said above, the garage is just too small. Not only that, but I’m sure that ten years from now, it will have fallen down itself. Back to guessing again, I’m pretty sure that when it was built, they only poured concrete footings around the walls, but left the main are dirt. At some point, it was filled with concrete to form the floor leaving a crack between the footings and the floor. Anyone who lives in an area that spends half the year below freezing would know that cracks in concrete are usually a bad idea. In our instance, the top of the footings have tilted away from the concrete floor. The side that happens to be the worst is the left side, which has 2-3″ of a gap. Hence the leaning.

While I’m pretty sure there is little we can do to utilize the existing structure, we are all ears. Either way, I’ll be saving as much of the wood that is in good condition for future uses. I need an excuse to purchase a planer anyways

Days until the Penske truck arrives at our new (old) house: 4. Days until I can start getting detailed pictures of what I am talking about to make it that much easier to understand: 4. Tick, tock, tick, tock…