The house was broken up into tiny rooms, separated by doorways, making the house feel much smaller than it was…
Tackling the common living space of the house was a daunting task. The house had decent square footage but all the rooms were separated by tiny doorways, making the house feel choppy and small.
We started in the front two rooms: the living and dining rooms. We removed the seventies paneling to discover layers upon layers of wallpaper. No matter how carefully we steamed off the wallpaper, chunks of the plaster came off as well. The process was taking forever and the walls were getting ruined. We decided the quickest/easiest way to make the wallpaper disappear was to just demo the walls.
So we rented a dumpster, wore masks, gloves, goggles and all that good stuff, and started swinging hammers. When we got to the ceiling we realized something we hadn’t noticed before... the ceiling height in the front two rooms was lower than the rest of the house. At some point in history, someone added a lower “false ceiling” in these rooms. That meant we had to demo the ceiling... twice!
About halfway through the day, we removed all the lath and plaster from the walls… then it was time to move all the rubble into the dumpster… 15 stairs down to the street, we carried 13 gallon trash cans full of rubble… dump, run up, fill, repeat. We moved over 2 tons of rubble in one day.
Next it was time to start putting the pieces back together...