Day 83 - Fire Bad

 Pull up carpet. Throw away.  Use rotary hammer to dislodge porcelain tiles. Discard. Remove nail after nail and screw after screw. Trash them. Then, the room is ready for the new kitchen project to begin,

Sounds simple, right?  Well, as with most projects, unexpected roadblocks transformed simple into strenuous and stressful. 

First off, the floor removal in this area was the most challenging. For some reason, the screws and nail placement was much more extensive than any other part of the house we had encountered so far. The time and blood lost due to the endless scrapes and scratches caused by this endless removal process was annoying to say the least. Once we were able to safely navigate the room without puncturing every shoe we had, it was time to get to the work we knew would be rigorous.

This room had a fireplace. My wife and I had no desire to have a fireplace, Since we were turning this room into the kitchen and needed all the space we could get, we needed to get rid of the fireplace. Easier said than done. Once our kitchen contractor was able to smash through the heavy duty bricks comprising the fireplace, he had to do some reinforcements. Though we would eventually want the now unnecessary chimney to come down, we wanted to save that for a later project and not risk a  full blown chimney collapse. Ths arduous and very exhausting task proved to be very necessary as we saw the degraded chimney structure. This was not just necessary to create our kitchen, it was necessary to protect the integrity of the entire structure of the house.

It was hard to tell just how often the fireplace had been used, but considering the extensiveness of the mouse nest colony and friendly little brown bats, we assumed it had been quite some time since the fire had been lit.

The effort in this particular demolition paled in comparison to the amount of energy expended in the cleanup. Part of this was our own fault as we salvaged as many fireplace bricks as possible to use for a future outdoor fire pit. 

Now, on to planning a kitchen.