The crooked house hits rock bottom
It’s been a little while, and the work I’ve done lately has been thankless. I decided to tear out my 3 layer thick living room ceiling, 2 layer thick kitchen ceiling, and the ceiling and walls in the wood framed parts of the back bedroom. Here’s what that looks like. Don’t be scared.
So, I naively thought I’d be paying a few hundred for people to take all this out. Wasting plastic bothers me, so I was drawn to the idea of this being loaded into a dump truck and hauled out. Instead, they would have bagged it all to get it out of the house. Makes sense I guess. That is a lot. And it would have cost me about $1350, or just short of 3x what I expected. Instead, I borrowed a good friend’s Suburban, brought in another good friend to help carry it out, and put a Bagster on my good parents’ driveway. I’m proud of them for letting me do this. I know the ugliness (and having the driveway blocked) hurt them. I left small scraps of my 8 vinyl kitchen floors on top so the neighbors could pick their favorite. Update: I promised I would give credit to Quinn, my brilliant next door neighbor, for providing me with the Bagster idea.
Is that the best $160 I’ve ever spent? Or was my new air conditioner? That’s a good question. But now my un-insulated and un-plastered back bedroom is fighting a losing battle with this heat. When my head was near the exterior walls I could feel the heat radiating on my face. But even if it was in the high 80’s, it was more bearable with the cool air blowing on me. It gave me the will to clean up that room. So here’s how the house looks today. Good enough to start putting in my new interiors, as I continue to haul out the trash.
I think you and I both may be a little starved for prettiness in this post (even if you can see one of my awesome doors) so look! I’ve cleaned enough to see (one tiny part of) my living room floor again!
16 Responses
Never mentioned why you needed to take out everything…
Stay tuned!
How long did all that demo and discard take? Thankfully this house has a relatively small footprint or we’d have to come excavate you from the rubble.
well you see that the demo of the old bathroom had already begun before we we smashed the bathtub, so it’s been a solid month. Now we can resume actual construction work but still have a little more cleanup to do. Readers, ask me about free kindling!
Having so much fun catching up with you (and the Crooked House!) today (at work… oops!)! Great job, Chad!
Well, have some more fun imagining my poor mother’s scream when she saw the post-demo, pre-cleanup photos in this post.
I hope you didn’t cause permanent damage to her psyche!
[…] soon though. And I’ve given the neighbors a view that just might be even classier than that Bagster. It’s the brakes, because the last time I did them myself and didn’t tighten the bolts […]
[…] been stuck shut for 6 months and the rear suspension was wrecked. Might have something to do with all that plaster I piled on the back seat and in the trunk. Or the […]
WOW! You are brave. I nearly screamed too when I saw those photos.
Ha, it took another 6 months to finish cleaning that up though
your story is fascinating! i think you are living every homeowner’s dream (and sometimes nightmare) of removing all shoddy work and starting from a clean slate. i would love to rip out all my walls and ceilings, but they’re in good shape, so that would be dumb.
I would have loved to keep more of the original stuff intact. If deterioration, obsolescence, and shoddiness didn’t all come together so much I might have.
obsolescence is a great word!
I don’t usually like it. It was used to justify knocking down houses like mine way too much. Especially along with dismantling minority neighborhoods
i know… that part sucks. so much amazing architecture wiped out to pad the pockets of rich uncaring developers.