Okay, so maybe it was.  Too bad for the Romans.  Anyway, buying an old house in serious need of repair is a serious excuse for buying a complete line of cordless tools.  For once in my life, this didn’t even require reading a lot of reviews online.  All my family members with cordless tools own 18v Dewalt.  Buying anything else would be … folly. 

Looks like present-day came early for me this year!  That’s the Dewalt tool 6 pack with the circular saw and driver.  I bought factory reconditioned to save some money.  The extra pair of batteries are new.  In the background is the combination shop light and dual charger.  None of my relatives have that item.  I”ll have to watch that it doesn’t walk off on me when they come to help.  “Hey, payment is in the form of pizza only!”  I found the best price online at Tool King.

My wife says I say “Oh crap!” a lot while tearing things apart.  Maybe this is true.  Gutting an old house reveals all the flaws you didn’t know about when you bought it.  Sometimes they are things you are suspicious of, like this bee’s nest:

The bees entered through a hole in the cedar shakes left by a cable TV installer, and built a nest at the bottom of the stud bay.  Since it took about 5 minutes to deal with them (a can of Raid and running away), why do people just let nests live in their walls?  I like bees.  I might even have a few hives at some point .. but they will be outside in boxes!

Another “Oh crap!” moment came when we first knocked out the insulation bats in one room so we could see the roof:

On closer inspection I realized we had skip sheathing on the roof.  I don’t know why this came as a surprise.  I knew the roof was originally cedar shake with 3-tab composite on top.  Cedar shakes are normally installed on skip sheathing to allow them to breath better.  Well .. new cedar roofs don’t meet fire code unless doused in nasty chemicals, so we’ll be re-sheathing the whole roof in OSB for a different roofing product.  Not an expense I had expected, but not that costly either.

The last two pictures are not of “Oh crap!” moments.  The first simply shows the current state of upstairs gutting.  No walls at all on the bedroom.  Plaster off in the hallway.

And finally, lest you think everything we tear out is going to waste, this shot into the other bedroom shows the huge pile of trim lumber we have saved.  My hope is to reuse original trim wood where possible.  All of this trim was painted, so we’ll have to find similar painted uses for it.  There’s also two baseboard heaters, and a huge pile of the veener siding in that pile.  The baseboard heaters are going to scrap metal.  It is quite possible that we will end up with baseboard heat to supplement our wood stove, but I’ll be searching for “baseboard heaters least likely to burn down your house” before making any purchases.

Lee and I worked on ripping apart the second upstarts bedroom. We uncovered more lath and plaster. This time we discovered that it had been painted a pale pink. I wonder if this means that I am going to have to paint it that color again to be period appropriate? The only problem is, I am not really a pink room sort of girl.

You can see where the dirt hit the house in the below picture. This is one of the areas that we have to clean up for insurance reasons. I’m not sure what they were thinking when they put all the dirt up on the house. Maybe they liked shingle rot and felt a fondness for termites?

I transplanted the Rhododendron and the unidentified green plant to the right of the house. I still haven’t decided whether to transplant the Camilla. Depends how big the root ball is I guess.

When we bought the house we knew that it came with feral cats. Our neighbor feeds them but they are all very spooky. Right now we have 6 feral cats all unfixed. One black mother cat with four black adolescent offspring and one gray stripped male cat. Our neighbor calls that one Smokey.

The mother is pregnant again we think. Once we borrow a live animal trap we are going to catch them and bring them in to get fixed. We don’t mind feeding them as they will keep the vermin down but we don’t want 50 feral cats running around the property.

Today was a plaster bashing day.  Seems like there has been a lot of those lately.  I’m going to just include the photos we took as a gallery and add comments there.  The historic item of interest today is the sealed hole in the chimney.  It appears that there was once a wood stove on the second floor as well.  I would love to have seen them.  Too bad we haven’t found a pair of antique wood stoves among all the junk on this property.  I wouldn’t reinstall them .. modern EPA certified wood stoves burn far more cleanly and efficiently than older models. I just feel annoyed that the previous owners got to tear out antique wood stoves and I’m tearing out photo-finish veneer siding.

Doesn’t Robin look cute in her Darth Vader respirator?

I like the glass globe in the first picture. It looks interesting and old to me. Yes I do realize that this is not an 1937 light globe. I do plan on reusing it when renovations are redone. It will help give the house an older feel and of course save a few dollars.

The second light fixture I am going to keep also. Well maybe one that is in better condition. Lee doesn’t like it as much as the globe. But he told me that it was because almost every light fixture in the house is this one. Guess they got a good deal or lacked creativity or they were the cheapest they could find at the time.

The third picture is the window sash weight. Its pretty neat looking. Almost all the the old windows sashes still work. I don’t know that I had ever seen one before.

The fourth picture is the window latch. So very neat. We are talking a lot about whether to replace the windows or keep them.

We have to grade the dirt on some sides of the house. Jessica and I worked on taking out brush along parts of the house. We still  haven’t graded the side of the house pictured but at least you can see the house now. We did work on grading the front of the house. It’s still not finished.

I’ve heard it said that removing lath and plaster from an old house is a sin.  That may be true.  There is a element of permanence and the skilled labor in plastered walls which drywall does not convey.  So why is this post about knocking down plaster walls?  Because the plaster walls in our house are only partially present and covered in glue from horrible veneer paneling.

When we bought the house we did not think there was any lath and plaster.  The main floor living room is knotty pine paneling, the bedrooms are plastered plywood (a trick used in the 1930s to avoid the cost of lath and plaster).  Upstairs the ugly veneer paneling abounded.  As it turns out, the whole second floor was lath and plaster at one time.  During a renovation sometime in the 80s the lath and plaster was ripped off the outside walls, the wiring was updated, and R11 fiberglass bats were added to the second floor walls and ceiling.  The veneer paneling was nailed onto the outside walls and glued over the lath and plaster interior walls.  The staircase was also revamped using drywall.

This image gives a good overview.  The strips of lath wood are visible behind Robin.  The plaster is all over the floor.  The knee wall on the left is undamaged plaster, as the 80s era insulators could get behind it through an access door and thus left it alone.  For anyone with the misfortune of a lath & plaster removal job, I recommend respirators, goggles, and overalls.  Even if your plaster doesn’t contain asbestos, there are decades of dirt, mold, and animal droppings that will cloud into the air and burst out at your eyes.

Another shot of the same wall.  Note the stud framed wall on the far right.  This was part of a closet addition, likely also from the 80s, which covered up sections of plaster and the original chimney.  Yes, that massive floor-to-ceiling structure is the chimney.  It ends a few inches from the roof sheathing.  Guess what?  The chimney was also broke off in the 80s during a re-roofing job when the woodstove was also removed.  The book “Renovating Old Houses” would call that ‘remuddling’.

The grey concrete circle in the chimney makes us wonder if there was original a wood stove on the second floor as well.  The chimney needs to come out too.  It’s out of plumb and probably too small to run a stovepipe through.  When we knock out the first section we’ll know if it had 1, 2, or 3 flues.  I’m voting for 3: a cookstove on the first floor, a woodstove on the first floor, and a woodstove on the second floor.  Then again, the two on the first floor could share a flue.  Now there’s a fire hazard.

I drive up almost every afternoon while Lee is working. Today’s project for me was taking out some limbs, blackberry bushes, cleaning up trash, sorting through toys, and making a walkway around the barn. We can’t insure the barn until it is painted and has tree limbs cut back.