The demo never seems to end. I pulled down the ceiling in the dining
room today. Doing this earlier would have made the wiring easier, but
when we were doing that, it didn't seem like we would need to take the
ceiling down. But then we discovered that the walls leak enough
outside air that without sealing that up or putting any insulation in
the joist space, the second floor will probably be cold, especially
since we are taking the carpet up.
As usual, the initial demo was fast. Cleaning up took more time.
Here's a picture of a joist that was hacked up to make room for a
duct. This could have been completely avoided given the way the
soffit was framed around the outside of the kitchen, but nope. I
won't try to fix that now, other than to just double it up. Doing
that might not help much, but it will make me feel a little better.
Today we doubled the notched joist, framed the short wall between the
kitchen and dining room, and reconnected the duct to the second
bedroom. Some forward progress.
We took a break from working on the house and spent a few days on the
road with my parents who were visiting for a week.
Unfortunately, we didn't have time to tour
Casa Loma,
but it's already penciled in for next time (whenever that might be).
With my dad's help, I got some wire pulled, some plaster removed, and
some wallpaper off the wall in the kitchen. We also added some
framing blocks to use for putting up the new sheetrock on the center
wall of the house between the dining room and kitchen. Look at that
lovely pink color we found under the wallpaper. Hmm, was that really
the color of the wall, or was it just a primer to go under the
original wallpaper, which I think we found under several other layers
on this wall, as it was more of the fruity pattern like we found in
the basement stairwell.
We doubled all the joists above the dining room today.
I also built a mock up of the peninsula/bar that we plan to put
between the dining room and kitchen. Having this will help us figure
out exactly how large it should be. I already think the bar is a few
inches too high.
I cleaned the wallpaper off of the wall behind the refrigerator. Like
the other wallpaper in the kitchen, it was a many-layered mess.
I also got sheetrock on the wall between the dining room and living
room. More forward progress!
We have a long weekend with a dry weather forecast, so we are getting
started on the front entry, inside and out. The first step was to
demo the inside. We didn't have to go too far before we found yet
another electrical box buried in the wall. You can see it just
starting to emerge from the plaster in the first picture below. This
one had small bits of floor tile behind the plaster. Although I had
already cut it loose from the ceiling light box when we started the
demo on the entry closet, I'm sure it was still live before that.
We made quite a mess, but had it all cleaned up before we quit for the
night.
Here are a couple of shots of the creative framing job and another
ceiling box that was hacked in.
