More Demolition, Part II
2007.03.23
Nate and I ran around for most of the day today, but in the afternoon he helped me continue the demolition work.
We took down the wall that had separated the hot water heater closet and corner closet from the main room. Actually, I had started this yesterday, but didn’t get very far. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a load-bearing wall, but to verify, I used a technique I saw on This Old House (one of my favorite shows, of course). I cut one of the studs with the cheap Harbor Freight reciprocating saw. If it had been a load-bearing wall, the weight would push the stud together at the cut, but both parts swung free, so it was only a partition wall. At any rate, we pulled all that down.
Then we tackled the south wall. Surprisingly, there was no knotty pine under the drywall, so Nate had most of that pulled off in about two minutes, enveloping himself in a cloud of dust that had him coughing and sneezing for the next half hour. While he started knocking studs out at the west end, I worked on carefully excavating around the electric wall heater towards the east end. (First I turned the breaker off.)
The wiring is stapled to a stud and runs up to a metal box near the ceiling. This wall heater is on the same 220-volt, 60-amp circuit as the one in the bedroom and in the dining room. I’ll have to figure out a safe way to cap off the wires to this heater so I can remove it, while leaving the wiring to the other two intact.
Along with some drawings, inscriptions on the south wall include “bug off”, “M.M. & Cheryl Callison”, and the “lovely days” of “July 10, 1979″, “July 13, 1979″, and “July 23, 1979″.
Couldn’t find any significant news events on those exact days, much less anything “lovely”, but on July 11, NASA’s Skylab began its descent to Earth; July 16th, former Vice President of Iraq Saddam Hussein assumed power; and July 19th the Sandinistas took control of Nicaragua.
More Demo, Part I