Our entire basement ceiling was covered with 1/4" plywood, which was the previous owner’s idea of finishing off the space enough to be able to rent out the space.  We had to pull down all the plywood to be able to access the joist cavities for plumbing, electrical, etc.  Here is a shot of the old plumbing.  Any hopes that we had of reusing any of it were quickly downed.  It was old cast iron that was about 3/4 full of rust and sediment.  Even the drain lines for the tub and sink were corroded to the point they couldn’t be used. 

OK, now what?  Answer: nothing, for a long, long time. About 19 months, to be exact.

This was our large pile of lath and trim wood after the demo. We were able to recycle all of the unpainted wood - it got turned into yard mulch.

The plaster ceiling has been pulled down, but the wainscotting is still in place. 

A few days later, we removed the wainscotting, which was made of beautiful, 3/4" solid old-growth douglas fir.  We had dozens and dozens of pieces of this pristine wood, which we planned to hold onto until we were able to reuse it in other projects, such as furniture.  However, our storage space for materials was constantly under pressure, and we admitted the reality that the wood would likely be sitting around for a decade before we actually had time to do anything with it.

Julio asked around and was able to find a coworker that was interested in the panels to finish off a cabin he was building.  So one day he came over with a trailer, and we loaded up all of the wood.  While it was a relief to get our space back, we were definitely sorry to see the wood go.  After all, it would have been really nice to somehow reuse the wood somewhere in the house or to create something new with it.  After a few months, Julio asked Tim how the wood was working out… 

"Oh, I didn’t have space, so I burned it."  Other than the fact that that was just stupid because of the lead paint, it was an incredible waste of irreplaceable wood.  We would have gladly taken it back if we’d been able to tell the future, but too late now…

While gutting the main room upstairs, we unearthed this very strange light fixture. It had 24 little bulbs arranged in a rectangle. It had been plastered over at some point, so we never knew that it was there. And, needless to say given our other experiences in the house, it was still connected to live wires. Before this point, we had already given up on the houses’ wiring and had made the decision to rewire the whole thing. While it took a lot of time, rewiring was one of the best decisions we made during this project.

If anyone has ever seen a fixture like this or knows anything about it, we’d be interested in hearing from you. Thanks.

This was one of the worst "surprises" along the way.  Much of the crawlspace area had been sealed off and had been inaccessible since the house was built in 1911.  We found that someone had gotten lazy and left dirt piled up under and against the main beam.  Definitely not what you want to find…

The good news was that the the old growth douglas fir that our house was framed with is an incredible wood.  It had been sitting against the dirt for 93 years, and it had rotted only about 1.5" on the bottom edge.  And there was no insect damage.  If this had been modern wood, it would have disintegrated long ago.  When we opened up the back wall of the house, we found a piece of wood from the 60’s that had been chewed to pieces by insects.  The adjacent, original stud that it had been nailed to didn’t have a single bite in it.  The bugs just aren’t interested  in this wood.  If they were, the back end of the house would’ve sunk down years ago!

Self-explanatory.  Demo’ing of the room wasn’t too bad, but who’s going to move the cast iron tub? 

The answer is that it is going to sit there for a long time, making it very hard to work on the room.  The moral of the story is to move out unneeded items right away.  We still haven’t learned that lesson.