The second day’s main agenda was starting to dismantle the chimney. It looked to be stone but we wouldn’t know until we started on it. While my husband and father-in-law started working out how they were going to tackle it, I had the messy and unenviable job of removing the sheeting from the ceiling of the rear verandah. The first few pieces were the plasterboard tiles but I quickly ran out of those and moved onto to the pieces that bizarrely resembled compacted shredded paper. Of course, all of them were covered in leaves and spider webs:
The skip arrived so I loaded my removed pieces in, along with all the plasterboard tiles from the dropped ceilings inside. On my way up and down the drive, I walk past this rather striking specimen of a tree:
The tree is right next to the driveway and had been cut down previously but had regrown. A helpful friend identified it as an empress tree, which while rather eye catching, grows extremely quickly. It is also notorious for causing major damage and it is very difficult to kill. Another job to deal with later…
Meanwhile, my husband and father-in-law had made a start on the chimney. The top was constructed of a double layer of the local limestone.
They discovered that demolishing the chimney was a three person job so I ended up moving the stone blocks they had already taken down and stacking them out of the way instead of finishing the verandah ceiling (which was a better place than leaving them on the scaffolding). With the top of the chimney gone, we could make a start on the larger part below the rafters. After carefully digging out the first of the stone blocks, the interior turned out to be built of red bricks and then the gap between the red bricks and stone blocks had been filled in with rubble and concrete. The rubble went in the skip but I couldn’t cart it out as fast as it was being dug out so I piled it in a heap to collect with a bucket and wheelbarrow next time. The bricks and stone blocks were wheeled out on a sack truck and piled in the front yard until we need to sort through them to rebuild the wall once the chimney is completely demolished. Once the side in the second bedroom was down about a third, we took a break.
Instead of moving heavy blocks, we emptied the loungeroom of the plaster and horse hair ceilings that were stacked against the wall:
We moved the scaffolding into the front bedroom and started working on that side. My husband carefully levered the blocks out and my father-in-law and I loaded them onto the sack truck and moved them out to the front yard. It was a warm day and given it was given Christmas Eve, we decided to call it a day at lunch time. Before we left however, my husband donned a dust mask and swept down the huge bird nest so we can access the remainder of the chimney without it falling on us:
That’s all for today – we will be back to do more on the chimney on Monday!
