demolition

After replacing the solid back door with the patio door, the concrete step was no longer in the right place.  So I rented a jackhammer and took care of the problem…

We removed the chimney to create space for a bigger pantry closet and a chase for heat ducts to the upstairs.  This was possible to do, because our new furnace and tankless water heater duct directly out the side of the house, making the chimney obsolete.  Our friend James pitched in once again to help take us take it down.  He worked like crazy with the cold chisel and sledgehammer, while Julio carted the bricks out to the backyard.  They were able to get the whole thing down in only 2 hours.  The old mortar helped a lot, as there wasn’t much holding the bricks together.

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

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

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.

The back ceiling has been opened up, and the old, unnecessary header is now gone.

Julio, after a day of tearing apart the kitchen.  The old cellulose insulation mixed in with ancient dust was definitely the messiest part of the job.

This was the original, narrow cabinet.  We later expanded it after removing the chimney.

This is the header that divided the main kitchen area from the nook (which used to be a porch).  Once this was removed, we had the full height across the entire kitchen.  This shot was taken from the kitchen side, so the area behind the header is the cavity above the nook.  This was completely non-structural, so it was really surprising that they built it out of sandwiched 2x12s.  Obviously, lumber used to be a lot cheaper.

Once we pulled down the drywall from the nook ceiling, we figured out that it actually used to be a back porch.  While the tongue and groove boards were charming, we really wanted to get the full height across the entire kitchen.