Some time after the roof was done I had a co-worker ask about the computer equipment I had left in the house. Since I had changed jobs and didn’t have time to mess with the items I had left, I made an offer he couldn’t refuse. He could have it all if he hauled it all off. Chris C. had it all out the next weekend.

O.K. time for a confession: Once I start working on something it is “sometimes” hard for me to stop.

Now that almost everything was out of the front of the house, I started cleaning it up a bit. One day I was looking at the paneling covering the fireplace and decided to see what was left. I used a hammer and pry bar to pull the paneling away to find most of the fireplace gone and the hearth pretty much trashed. A shame. Mark did find some old newspapers from the 60s though.

I also found that the studs near the fireplace didn’t have any insulation in between them. So I pulled off the next piece of paneling as well. Then the next…and the next. Not one bit of insulation in the outer walls. I couldn’t believe that they would do that. I ended up taking out the paneling off of every wall inside and out.

When I started getting crazy on the paneling, I had to remove the first row of tiles from the drop ceiling. As I had never removed them I was surprised at all the garbage that came down with them. Dust, dead bugs, beer cans, and pieces of mortar from the original ceiling literally rained down on me and the floor.

It took another month to get the rest of the drop ceiling out of the house. The exposed stucco ceiling was full of holes, cracks, and nails. Using a hammer I broke up the ceiling stucco and fed it to the garbage men one garbage can at a time till there was only lathing left. This took me several more months of very hard, very dirty work. The redeeming factor was that all of the ceilings were about eight feet tall after all of the removal.

Now I had a house with an outer wall and studs showing, a ceiling bare of mortar, all of the ceiling fans, lights, and electrical faceplates were removed. The wood floor was bare and obviously patched up. The kitchen cabinetry was coming apart and the floor was rotting under them. Somewhere in there the toilet had started leaking so had been turned off. And while removing the bathroom wall I had broken the sink. Oh and the fireplace was trashed.

On the bright side all of the electrical wiring had been replaced sometime in the recent past with breakers and grounded 10-2 wire.

At this point I was pretty much committed. (Or should have been committed?) I decided to replace the walls and roof and to re-do the bathroom and kitchen as required.