Minor Demolition

I haven't been posting much. You know the story, I've been busy, blah, blah, blah

Some progress has been made on the Great Attic-to-Studio Project.

First, Joe stood up all of the boards he had cut in front of the porch. Then he went on the porch roof and I would grab the boards and push them up to him until he could reach them, then he put them through the window. He was then ready to start putting a floor down in the third section of the attic.  He was hoping to start working on the insulation, but it needs to be extra-wide, and he wants formaldehyde-free, and that is a special order. We'll get that next week. Here is Joe getting to work.

I made a joke that I could start dismantling the chimney, but he thought I could do it. He gave me a hammer and a wide chisel that he called a brickset. He said to just put the brickset under the corner of a brick and give it a whack. It was almost alarming how easily these bricks came apart.

I knocked the mortar off the bricks and put that stuff into pails and had quite a pile of bricks next to me in a short while. The bricks were wider than modern bricks I have seen. I am excited about using them somewhere in the yard.

I had imagined having to take wide swings with a sledgehammer to get the thing apart. Joe says the old mortar is not so good, and I would never have this easy a time if I were to attempt to take apart the modern chimney that runs up the outside of the house. While this was relatively easy work, getting the buckets of mortar out of the attic was not. I definitely got a workout there. I still have a lot of bricks to get down from up there. I am so happy to have this done, it was blocking the only actual wall space there is in that area.

There was a space between the chimney and the side of the house that was stuffed with crumpled-up pieces of that weird paper that is all over the attic. I was removing that as I took off layers of brick. Also, the chimney itself was filled with brick and mortar from when they disassembled the part of it that used to go out through the roof. I had to dig that out as I went down. I kept hoping I would find some kind of treasure. Well, I did! I want to clean it up a little before I present it in my next post.