A lot of people think demolition work on a house is a lot of fun. Some things are. But after the big jobs (which tend to be the fun ones) are all done, there are a lot of smaller jobs that are slow and tedious. We did some of those jobs yesterday. And we did more today. Add that to the fact all of us are sporting cuts and bruises – my husband twisted his ankle stepping onto an uneven piece of concrete from a ladder, my father-in-law didn’t quite get his hand out of the way of a falling piece of chimney and I have several bruises from tumbling timber trim. It was also 37C today and it feels every bit that much when you are working in a house with no cooling and no ceilings. We only spent 4 hours there today but we got a few jobs done.
It took me almost the entire 4 hours to remove the skirting boards in the 3 bedrooms. We tried the pry bar yesterday but none of them seemed willing to shift without significant damage to the skirting board, the wall or both. So I started the slow job of carefully chiselling along the tops of each board and carefully levering them out with the pry bar. They are all affixed with very long nails, hammered into narrow wooden pegs in the stone. I’ll have to grab a photo of them when I take off the last board tomorrow.
We saved some of the pieces of skirting board. We will be replacing all the skirtings in the bedrooms but we need the old boards to run along the added on section of the lounge room to make it match the rest of the room.
We are hoping to be able to plaster the lounge room, whereas all the bedroom walls will be sheeted with plasterboard, hence the difference in the need to keep the skirting boards. But because we are hoping to plaster the lounge room, I also needed to find a way to remove the remaining paper mache that stubbornly refused to come off with the paint scraper. An old chisel works but it is again another slow job:
The carport is now only upright posts and a few bits of loose tin. It simply got too hot to do much more work – the metal pieces were hot to handle even with gloves.
We ran yet more electrical wiring (which is very hard to take photos of without climbing up on to the 10 foot walls). But we got some more of the stone wall built – we need 6 more rows:
While I had the pry bar out, I removed the extra timber at the top of the door frame to the hall way:
We were all hot and dusty by mid-afternoon. Even critters were looking for somewhere cool – I found a large centipede hiding behind a skirting board in one room and an ugly spider in another. We made a few plans for tomorrow and headed home to the air conditioned house and the swimming pool!
Hasta luego!
