Yes we did it again. After much putting off on Lee’s part we finally worked on tearing out most of the living room ceiling. We left a stretch on at the very front of the house as it helps keep the heat in. That part of the ceiling goes straight up to the roof so we aren’t taking it off until we have too.

Lee starts out the nasty job by wearing eye protection but forgetting his breather mask. That and MUCH grumbling. We moved most of what we could out of the way.

I help out by vacuuming the plywood ceiling before it was all way pulled down. That way it helped contain the mess and get less poop everywhere. It actually worked pretty well. There were no clouds billowing up. Still a lot of mouse poop and what not every where, but that couldn’t be helped.

Lee remembered to put on his breather mask. Jessica and I resorted to using our shirts. After Jessica left I went and got my mask though.

Lee was thrilled to see that the builders of the house cut into the ceiling floor joist to install the light fixture. I think that they wanted people to fall through the floor.

We also discovered that there was a house fire at one time. Lee had to take off a few paneling boards by the kitchen to get the ceiling plywood off. When he did that we saw this…

So we are thinking that there was a kitchen fire at one time. The paneling boards are not put back in order so some are chared an others are not. There are also some new two by fours and different nails used to put the paneling boards back up. It will be interesting to see how many more boards are burned like that in the kitchen wall.

And finally the air quality picture…..I so hate mouse poop….

After all the floors had been vacuumed up and then mopped, couch disenfected, showers taken, poop clothes taken down to my mom’s to be washed, and the kitchen wiped down, we are all ready to put off taking out the rest of the ceilings for a long while again.

Lee tore out the paneling by the front door in the living room. Nothing too exciting. Things we discovered by taking off the wall paneling are:

• Tongue & groove covers at least one wall in the front bedroom
• Plywood is nailed over the tongue & groove
• Strange zigzag bracing fills that wall  … more badly done sheer support?

For those who remember our post regarding a mouse poop shower, recent developments have make that one seem like showering in a spring rain.  Our living room and front bedroom have plywood ceilings oddly enough.  That was apparently a quick wall-covering method in the days of slow (and expensive) lath and plaster.

Unfortunately, before the stove can go in, the plywood ceiling must go out.  The good thing about tearing out plywood is that it comes out in large sections.  The bad thing about plywood is that it comes out in large sections, like this:

When I tore down the first section, a plume of dirt, mouse poop, shredded insulation/nesting material, and mummified mice followed.  By the time I got to a respirator, Robin was calling down from upstairs that she could “smell mouse poop” in the air.  “You mean that general haze?  Yeah, sorry about that.”

So, once again, a deceptively simple project turns messy … literally.

Lee ripped out the wood paneling in preparation for the stove. While Lee was doing that he had two curious animals wondering what he was doing. First it was Edgar looking through the stairwell. Then it was Jasper wanting to know what Lee was up too.

Here is the bared stairwell.

Someone was busy tonight. Remember when we were puzzling over the weird cross bracing in this picture?

Lee got busy tonight.

This is what that wall looks like from my kitchen and from the bedroom now.

Someday I hope to post about putting up a wall instead of tearing them all down.

Lee’s Note: I’d like to say that I did not simply throw caution to the wind and knock out the cross braces.  First I consulted with two different people involved in construction.  Everyone came to the same conclusion, namely:

1. This appears to be some sort of shear bracing
2. This has absolutely no value as shear bracing

Given the fact that the lath and plaster walls I took down added considerably more shear strength than these silly little diagonal pieces, I knocked them out as well.  Since we live in a potentially siesmic area, I’ll look into added more shear strength to the house overall before I close up the walls.

Our immediate order of business is to mount a 200A electrical panel inside this wall.  I’ve got 52 feet of 2/0 aluminum cable (at $4 a foot) which will carry the house load from our newly installed meter main outside, through the crawlspace, and then up into this stud bay.  Here’s hoping I can get that all done tomorrow. If so, hot water will be a 5 minute job.

As I’ve said before, the blessing and the curse of gutting a building is that you find all the flaws.  Ever since I gutted the walls in the back bedroom I’ve felt suspicious about the closet.  The closets upstairs were just tacked on additions with no ulterior motives.  But this closet downstairs .. it was framed out with 4×4s and on a pedestal.  I decided to leave it until after the ceiling was out.

I’m glad I did.  When the dust settled from falling plaster and the last hazel nut rattled to a stop on the floor, this is what we saw:

From my reading on timber frame construction, I know that notching a horizontal member greatly diminishes it’s strength.  How does that translate to stick construction?  Well, the book Code Check 5th Edition says that the middle 1/3rd of floor joists may not be notched at all and the outer thirds may only be notched to 1/6th the depth of the joist and only on the top.  Yeah .. um .. how many of the rules do these notches break?

It appears that their solution to this damage was to create a ‘load bearing closet’.  Then they framed in some cross members with joist hangers to pass some of the floor load above onto this closet.  I believe at least one of those pipes is an active water line, so we’ll have to have a second bathroom functional before trying to straighten out this particular mess.

I’m certainly no Bob Villa.  I’ll even admit to sitting at a desk in my day job.  But if you do a bit of reading on home construction topics, you realize that there is a central theme to it called “common sense”.  Gravity is trying to pull everything down, heat travels from warm areas to cold areas, electricity will follow the path of least resistance, etc.

Unfortunately, Horace Greeley was right: “Common sense is uncommon.”  Old homes are often great demonstration grounds for this sort of thing. Decades of hacked solutions to immediate problems layer onto neglect and complacency .. perhaps some pictures sum it up best:

Today was one busy day. It started with us getting around early and doing a million errands in town. We went to a ton of tile shops. I picked out a bunch that I liked but Lee wasn’t quite sold. He wanted a tile that was richer in color. I have already picked out (as of now) a dark slate for under the stove. For behind the stove we are looking at hand painted tiles. That’s what’s hanging Lee up. We are looking for a jade green. Not too light but not too blue but not too bright green and not too shiny. Sounds easy huh? HA! And not only the special color of green but coordinating tile colors to go with it.

Tiles aside we then bought low VOC primer to get part of our house ready for the electrician on Monday and a pressure washer to also do prep work. The below picture is Lee later that night trying to figure out how it went together. I should start a list of new tools that Lee gets to buy for working on this house but I am afraid I’d loose track.

As soon as we got to the house we ended up burning one of our small burn piles. It was the pile of brush that we took away from the side of the house. My Mom and me had a ‘burning’ urge to start something on fire since it was the first burn day of the season. Evidence below that it really happened. We had it put out on time as we were warned by a neighbor that the Fire Marshal lived down the street and was a real stickler for making them be out by 5 p.m.

Lee then went on to vent his frustration on a poor innocent stump. He had to grade soil by the house for the ground rods that get put in on Monday. Yeah new wiring soon!

Lastly my brother Robert came over to help for a while. He is feeling sorry for us because he didn’t realize we were moving in so soon. Robert ripped out the top part of the divider wall for us and a bit of the molding. We always appreciate free labor from sympathetic family members. Thanks Robert.

Wednesday and Thursday my Mom and Uncle Forest came up to help me in the afternoon. Somehow I forgot to take my camera and when I remembered it the next day the battery went dead. Bum timing. Anyways, the cleaning up for the garage sale continued along with massive nail pulling, dry wall tear down, plaster cleanup, and sweeping. One room upstairs was pretty much cleaned up and the hallway and stairs (though my Uncle kept getting it dirty again with his dry wall tearing out).

This Friday Lee bought a shop vacuum. I have decided this is a girls best friend while living (soon) in a disaster zone. That night I vacuumed the upstairs room as shown in the picture above. It was so much fun watching everything get sucked up. I even vacuumed up a huge stinky mouse nest in the upstairs flooring that was uncovered. Dead mouse and all. I did have to pound a little on the nozzle to get the petrified mouse all the way in and up.

Lee started tearing off trim. He and I were very curious about what was under the main floor paneling. Basically he had just uncovered some of it before I wanted to leave.

This was his method of being careful in removing the big trim. We want to reuse the trim boards where we can in the house again. See we knew the awful siding we tore out would come in handy for something. Pry bar wood protection.

Today was a busy day in which we got a lot cleaned up outside. Lee’s parents Sallie and Jim came down again to help and my sister Jessica came up with me. The whole afternoon was spent hauling trash to the dumpster, burnables to the burn pile, sellables to the yard sale area or in the waiting to be cleaned areas, and recyclables in the recycle piles.

Behind the barn is all clean. It looks awesome.

I forgot to take an after picture but this is Jim working on a trash pile. The pile that he is working on is now gone.

Sallie is in this picture. All the stuff around in this shot is now sorted and gone.

Same here with Jessica. It is all gone.

After I drove Jessica back home and relaxed, I came back up to get Lee. He had been busy himself that evening. Most of the of the back downstairs room is ripped out now. Here are two pictures of the uncovered stairway. The closet where he was working was a newer addition so some of the stairs had to of been changed.

In this part we discovered some newer studs in the wall. So we are not sure what was there or happened originally.

This last picture makes me really nervous. It is a line of mouse poop along the ceiling. The dry wall has been ripped off on the wall but the not the ceiling. And when you can see a long line of mouse turds stretching the ceiling line you know you are going to be in for a big nasty.