Wire Lath Is the Tool Of Satan

Wire lath and screw nails. Both. Tools. Of. Satan.

I knuckled down to do some perfectly straightforward destruction this afternoon. Needed to yank up a tile floor. Shouldn't be a big deal - you slam a big heavy sledgehammer into it, it cracks into a dozen pieces, you throw it in a garbage can. Lather, rinse, repeat. In an hour you're done.

Enter Team Whackadoo. They laid down a layer of wire lath first (we posted about its virtues, in a NON-INSANE application, HERE) and nailed it down with SCREW NAILS. So the mudbed is adhered to the lath. If it were not adhered to lath, I could get a crowbar under it and use it's inherent brittleness to crack it and pull it right up. But the lath is very, very flexible. It holds the mudbed together, even after it's cracked in a million pieces, and keeps it very firmly attached to the floor with SCREW NAILS.

Let me tell you about screw nails for a minute. Screw nails are for exterior applications. They're good for nailing on shingles in a wind-shear environment. They're for nailing together the structural members of your house that you NEVER EVER WANT TO TAKE APART. So why are they to be found every damn where in our house? Screw nails holding on molding? Seventeen of them holding down a 4"x4" square of floor patching? (I counted, as I cursed.) Someone on Team Whackadoo just loved him some screw nails. He had a big old 20lb bucket of them, and by god he put every single one into his house. There are so many screw nails in this house, I imagine if you hovered a large enough magnet over our roof, we'd fly away like the house in Up.

But back to the floor.

Wait, no, not back to the floor. Screw the floor. With screw nails.

Not So Bad, It Turns Out

Quick update - I took down part of the tin ceiling we're hoping to salvage today. Turns out that most of the plaster had been removed before the tin went up, and what was between the tin and the joists was a layer of proto-drywall and some wooden strapping. The proto-drywall (essentially plaster board) was actually doing just fine, and not falling down onto the tin at all. Clearly the work of pre-Team Whackadoo owners.

Yesterday Katherine was fretting that, even if we managed to salvage the tin ceiling, it would eventually have to come down, because we don't want our eventual spawn to sleep beneath falling-down plaster. I pointed out that the tin would catch the plaster and start to sag long before said spawn was in any actual danger, but it's a future parent's job to worry and Katherine is on it. She's a woman who takes her job seriously.

Point being, she can find something else to worry about, because there's actually no plaster up there. Which is also too bad for our friend Maura Spery, who laughed her ass off at us when we told her we were going to try to save the tin. The thing is, Maura generally knows what she's talking about, so when she laughs at us we generally pay attention. Maura, we promise to try to do something else completely insane for you to laugh at real soon.

Ninety-nine bags of debris from the wall, ninety-nine bags of debris...

As Jen promised, here is live-action footage of us in full demolition mode. This is the really fun part; it lasts about 20 minutes, and then we have to clean up for 10 hours.

Did we mention that we reached the one hundredth bag of debris? We're now about 25 bags past that--and we aren't actually counting the big black bags of debris, only the little white bags, because we didn't start to count bags until we were onto the second demo project. We are on our second 100-bag roll of the black 33-gallon, 4mm contractor bags, but most of the first hundred were used upstairs on the tenants' apartment.

Our next task is to deal with the tin ceiling in the front bedroom. We really want to keep the ceiling, but there is naturally enough a wrinkle. In the course of tearing down the wall separating that room from the ex-kitchen, we discovered that the tin ceiling was not, in fact, original. It had been pretty well installed, which disguised its non-originalness (imagine that--renovation work that wasn't crappy!), but there was a painted plaster ceiling with an original molding underneath it (or, technically, on top of it, since the tin was installed as the second layer). The plaster, as is the way of plaster when it reaches the ripe old age of 100 or so, has fallen from the lath onto the tin below it, which is holding the plaster up through being attached to itself by a series of tiny wire nails. Does this sound like a disaster in the making to you? Does to me!

Our House Is Made of Doors

It seems like every time we open up a wall, there's a door in it. Isn't there some Christian-y saying about closing doors and opening windows? So what should we intuit god thinks of us if s/he has seen fit to lead us to a house in which the doors are sealed up in plaster and drywall from which not even a sawzall will free them?





You know I'm always up for having a good laugh at the expense of Team Whackadoo, but I honestly can't argue with this one. They wanted to close up the door opening - why not just use the door? Presciently eco-friendly, I call it. Anyway, here it is.












This is the wall that was the object of this week's aggression. (The previous picture is the other side of this wall, and the aforementioned door is sealed behind this drywall.) There's a fun video of me and Katherine whaling away at it with the 12-lb sledge, which we'll post at some point.







This is our dust. Don't I look cute with a respirator on?

(quote of the week from sometime around this moment:

Katherine: I think I just sawed through a supporting beam.

Turned out not to be supporting, but you gotta love hearing something like that said out loud, and not on a madcap half-hour sitcom with Scott Baio.)



This is the ex-wall. Stay tuned for hilarious videos of dust and destruction.

The Drawing Board

I (Katherine) have spent the last six days mostly horizontal, for I have been sick. On our last day in LA--which, much to my astonishment, I did not hate--I started having sore-throat-ness and runny-nose-ness and body aches and fatigue, and by the time we got home I was a mess. I have been asleep most of the last few days, when I wasn't coughing or blowing my nose. I'm sure it had nothing to do with all the little germ sinks lovely children I was hanging out with in San Francisco.

So I have not been knocking down any walls, to say the least. I thought this might be a good time to go back a step or two and look at the planning process, which we didn't blog through as it wasn't very photogenic. Everyone will be shocked to learn that Jen got obsessively detailed about making the plans. As you might be able to see in the photo, she made scale drawings of the house, and little scale cutouts of our furniture, and moved everything around until she was completely happy with how everything was.

Our full plan is to basically knock everything down in the garden level (which you knew) and rebuild the center of the house so that it's full of bathrooms. (If you click on the picture, you'll get an enlarged version that is probably more comprehensible. What it looks like now is here, if you're curious.)
There will be a bath and a half on this floor, plus a gigantic closet where I can live when I'm bad. (Or, maybe, when I'm very good.) We've (very cleverly, in my opinion) put pocket doors in strategic places that will allow a sort of shifting configuration and access to the tub/shower combined with privacy for everyone.

Then, once that's all squared away, we'll move our stuff downstairs and knock down the wall upstairs.
What we're basically creating is a huge open space with a galley kitchen on one side. We'll delineate kitchen/living room with flooring and furniture, and we'll have a big rolling island near the kitchen, and a dining table near all the fabulous huge windows at the kitchen end. When we need to, we'll be able to move things around and put out a long table to seat the Mongol hordes. Oh, and we're putting another half-bath next to the stairs, where the hall has been blocked to make two separate apartments, because all those Mongols will need someplace to pee.

Raining in LA

We arrived in LA on Thursday morning and got the tour of my brother's new house. He and his girlfriend Andrea bought this place from a pot farmer, and it had been ill-used, to say the least. Go ahead and make a sweeping generalization about how a pot farmer might treat a house, based on stuff you've seen in the movies, and you'll be about right. The garage was extra-special - fourteen power outlets and a grid for hanging grow-lights. The place needed a ton of work, which they did, and now it looks like a photo spread for Dwell Magazine.

So when my brother looked at our place last summer and said, "Wow. Holy shit," we took that as a bad sign.

It turns out that there's really nothing to do in LA when it rains. Everyone gets confused and disoriented, people don't know how to drive, and all the cool stuff is inaccessible. And extra-special for us, it's rained most of the time we've been here. Fortunately, my brother has a lovely house that is really nice to hang out in, and lots of citrus fruit we can't get in the Northeast right now.

Also, he and Andrea got a Tibetan Terrier named Potsie who looks like Jim Henson designed the Platonic Form of Muppet Dog and gave him to Tinkerbell to hit with an Extra-Cute and Alive spell. So Potsie's been entertaining us thoroughly.

We had lunch with Jessica Dellecave yesterday, which was great. She's getting her PhD in queer performance theory and I only sort of kept up with the conversation, but she looks happier than I've ever seen her and it was great to catch up.

We had dinner with Lynne Kuemmel, one of my oldest friends, and pretty much laughed our asses of through a pan-Asian dinner and drinks. I had Soju, which is kind of like Korean rice vodka, and is apparently an LA thing.

We return to Brooklyn on a red-eye tonight. By Wednesday we should know how much our new plumbing and electric is going to cost. Because nothing says "Welcome Home" like a $10k estimate. Yahoo!

Fleeing the Filth

It was dirty in our house. So we went to California.

Seriously, you can't imagine the level of filth engendered by the Accidental Enormous Project. Ev. Ry. Thing. Covered in a layer of very fine dust. Which would make any sane person less sane.

Plus, there are a lot of people we like in California. Like Katherine's oldest friend, Hilary, who is seriously high-octane entertainment, and her equally wry and hilarious partner Wendy, and their three great kids - two boys who tear around the house at 100 miles per hour and one girl who watches it all calmly and has already figured out that boys are dumber than girls.

And like my old friend Antoun, who we adore, despite his insistence on dating women who are crazier than he is, and who took us to eat sushi we didn't even recognize as a fish product, but was revoltingly delicious. Monkfish liver I think it was. Really, really delicious, as long as you didn't think about it very much. We love Antoun and he makes us laugh a lot.

And Katherine's old buddy from college, Seth, whose daughter Sophia is charming and who tolerated the very small future sociopath at the tot park with aplomb, and her other daddy Jerry who seemed really lovely but who we didn't get to spend much time with.

And another of Katherine's old friends, Johanna, with whom we had a super-fast, super-stimulating lunch for about an hour and then she had to run back to work to continue being frighteningly good at what she does, which is high-end publishing of books written by really smart people, many of them probably not quite as smart as her.

And my old boss and mentor, Michael Warr, who is responsible for my current professional competence, and who is also just great fun to be with.

And Carl Tashian, who is coding the OurGoods site but is so much more interesting than even that.

So if you got to choose between Hilary, Antoun, Michael, Johanna and Carl, or filth wafting up through every crack and crevice and making your snot black, which would you pick?

We thought so.