Floor and wall! Or, at least, part of a wall. In the background you see Juan and Cesar putting insulation in the ceiling, so that someday one of us will be able to have a conversation downstairs without having the other one hear every word upstairs. The metal studs are making it look like a prison right now, but it will be a real wall with real doors before you know it.We had to avert our eyes and hide upstairs when Cesar and Gallo took a sawzall to the supporting wall yesterday, despite the fact that they were doing it on purpose and with a frame build, but all went well, and we will be able to enter our new bathroom.
Now that we are finally done ripping things out, I took an inventory of some of the things that we found in the walls of the house in the process of demolishment. Some of them were things you'd expect to find in a wall--ancient leftover wiring that no longer wires anything; an original (incredibly inefficient) heating duct that led from a coal furnace downstairs to heating grates in the hallways; an old gas line. Some of them were amusing or somewhat puzzling. A red plastic comb, such as a little girl might wear in her hair? I guess they had a seven-year-old do the plastering. The Daily News sports section from March 22, 1959? Newspaper has always been a fine building material.
The best ones, though, are pictured at right. A bottle of roach powder, not only encased in the wall but actually cemented in, and a cheese grater. How do you get a cheese grater into the wall? Why do you get a cheese grater into the wall?
