We spent the day working at the new, but very old, house. While Brandon made noise and dust and made dramatic changes by removing walls and floors, I spent hours crawling on the floor pulling carpet pad staples from the upstairs floors. Every time I came downstairs to make sure none of the thumps I could hear had done him bodily harm, I could tell his progress by the piles of debris and the missing structure. I'm sure when he came to check my progress with the staples he was just as impressed. It's not like my job doesn't have it's own dangers, too. A stray staple can do major damage - to your pants when scooting on the floor.
I really hope he enjoys putting walls back up as much as he enjoys tearing them down. We are considering some changes to the floor plan, and ripping off the old paneling and the crumbling plaster and lath is helpful to visualize how the rooms would look with some of the walls gone. Hopefully the whole house doesn't fall down because of our "repairs."
We knew there were moldy places from the leaky roof, but today we found some wall joists that were severely damaged by termites. It looked like termite damage from long ago, but we will be replacing the damaged wood. So exciting!
The stuff that I've been calling plaster, that is plastered to the lath on the walls, looks more like concrete to me. And it full of hair. At least that's what it looks like. Short hairs of all different colors. I tried to take a photo of it, and maybe you can see the hairs sticking up from the top of the broken piece on top. I don't know what kind of hairs these are, but it's sort of gross.
We have a big dumpster that gets emptied once a week and we have filled it twice so far. We are keeping most of the boards for other projects, I kept all the old carpet to use to kill grass in the future garden, and we will be able to have a great bonfire someday with all the lath that we have kept from the walls. Even trying to reduce the amount of waste, we are definitely contributing to the landfill with this project, and we aren't finished with the demolition yet.
2 comments:
Travis says that they used to mix horse hair into plaster for strength? We feel that this is true.
I feel that is is true too! You are the second person to tell me it was horse hair. This makes me feel better. For some reason I was imagining the original builders wife sweeping up the clippings from her forteen children for years on end until they finally had enough to plaster the walls. Creepy.
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