One Month Later

Hello all. My blogging skills are sub par apparently. It turns out it is difficult to gut a house, work more than full time, stay sane AND keep up with a blog (Jess, I don't know how you do it).

Well, I've made some serious deconstruction progress in a month. The place is basically fully gutted. I've been saying it will be done in two weeks for about the last 3 weeks but I really think that it will be done in two weeks now.

The third floor is fully gutted and even "cleaned". At the end of April, when I moved out of my apt in Cambridge, I cleaned the attic so that I could live in there while I gutted the rest of the house. That plan didn't really work because even cleaning that floor didn't really leave it all that livable. The rest of the house was covered in a not-so-fine layer of fine dust that carries throughout the entire place. The attic is open, both through the floor boards and the hallway to the second floor and within a few hours there was a layer of dust on the floors I had just cleaned. To be fair, all I did was sweep and quickly vacuum them so the majority of the dust probably just settled back down after the sweeping but either way, I decided it was too dirty and hot to reside up there.

So instead of staying in my house I decided to stay in my generous parents basement. My first week out of Cambridge I split time between Winchester in the basement and my friends Emily and Brian's place in Medford around the corner from mine. That seemed like it would be a good plan but I was so discombobulated having all of my stuff spread between my house, Em and Brian's, my folks and my old apt in Cambridge I decided I had to consolidate. Em and Brian offered me the option to stay at their place when ever I wanted, which is incredibly generous but I felt guilty actually living there (although their office is where I currently sit typing this). So I logically moved into my garage.

My friend Mike helped me or more like I slightly helped my friend Mike re-roof the place first. I knew the place leaked a little because there was a small puddle of standing water in there will the huge rain we had in late March but I wasn't aware how bad the leak was. While still at Em and Brian's I woke up early one Saturday morning to a thunderstorm. I lay in a nice relaxing dust free environment listening to the storm until I realized that I had just moved all of my possessions out of Cambridge and had them stored in my garage, which may or may not have a legit leak. I popped out of bed and headed over to check it out. I opened the door and sure enough, the garage had a legit leak. I first tried to locate my rain coat and boot but couldn't find anything in the chaos of black garbage bags filled with all my clothes and everything else I own so I began trying to "tarp" the roof in loafers, jeans and a tee shirt. I didn't have a ladder tall enough to get me on the roof so I propped it up on a patio chair I had and tentatively climbed up to the top step and tried to step up on to the roof. All this was made more difficult by the weight and awkwardness of a 20'x30' tarp in tow and torrential rains soaking me. After an hour I somewhat successfully aligned the tarp enough over the roof to keep new water from entering. I moved my wet chair and suitcase to the mostly dry basement and headed to NYC for a bachelor party. Not a very relaxing start to a long weekend.

Back to the house, I'll make this short from here on out. This is what happens when I don't write anything for a while, I have lots of stuff to fill people in on.

The place is gutted beside the kitchen and the baths. I pulled the carpet on the stairs and in the second floor hallways because I was getting covered in plaster dust that would rise in a plume from the carpet as I walked back outside. The wood under the carpet looks good, it just needs a sanding.

This is my makeshift kitchen currently.

After Mike helped out pulling down some ceilings on the second floor, which was a vile job, and coughed up blood for a few days I switched to full face respirators. I should have worn them from the beginning. It was almost pleasant to pull down the ceilings and have clouds of soot rain down because I felt like I was in a little protective suit. In reality, it was still terribly disgusting but at least my eyes, nose and mouth didn't get covered.

I haven't found too many more exciting discoveries as of late, besides a little wainscoting in the hall way down stairs.

I had my first dumpster hauled away, there was over 15,000 lbs in there. That is a lot of garbage buckets full of plaster.

I'll try to keep these up to date more regularly so they aren't so long because if I was reading this I probably would have stopped a while ago.

For those energy efficiency folks reading this, check out the air movement between the drywall and the sheathing in the addition. This is why not to use fiberglass.