This is an original wall, and so we thought it would be easier to take down - things that are built well are generally easier to take down than things that are built by Team Whackadoo.
This is me taking the first swing. (The thing about the gloves was metaphorical.) If you take a look at the bit of wall below the bit of wall that I'm destroying in this picture, you can kind of see the problem. Rather than finding a plaster and wooden lath wall, we found a layer of sheetrock covered in a layer of wire lath covered in a layer of Structolite (we posted about Structolite HERE back in the spring). Team Whackadoo was definitely in evidence. So instead of the Sawzall going through the wall, as they say, like butta, it was a struggle.
Here's Dad having at a surprisingly ruggedly-built bump-out. The room he is in (on the other side of the wall that was today's preoccupation) is an ex-kitchen from when the building was being used as a 5-family. If any bank thought we were planning to use the building outside of it's 2-family C of O, they would not lend to us, so the seller had to cover up all traces of the building being used illegally. This bump-out covered up the plumbing for the ex-kitchen. Let's just say it was no match for Dad.
Laura is an old hand at demo. Here she is turning a closet wall into an ex-closet-wall. Get on with your bad self, Laura!
Team Whackadoo returns. See that weird suspended piece of wood in the middle of the wall? Turns out they built the wall out of a half a door. Not a whole door - they bothered to cut it in half. Whatevs. You can see what remains of the original wall at the far right - I've smashed out the plaster and the wooden lath is exposed.
Shall we pause to consider the resiliency of the common cockroach? This is an ex-telephone outlet. Chock full of ex-cockroach bodies. Guess what's for dinner?
Here's how we left things for the night. Despite the satisfyingly large hole, we're only about half done. The next big project is to try to remove the millwork from the doorways without destroying it, so we can use it to replace badly-damaged millwork upstairs. That's a slow and picky process. Stay tuned.
