More Demo and Scraping
2007.05.05
Today I think I finished pulling all the stuff off the walls that’s going to come down. Maybe a couple things left, like the electric wall heater and the stud it is attached to.
Nate came over and helped pull nails out of the concrete wall. The basic process was to hook a hammer or prybar onto the nail, with a scrap piece of wood for a leverage point, and then hang from it until the nail either popped out or sheared off.
Next we started scraping loose paint and wallpaper off the concrete walls. But with only paper masks and no direct ventilation (the hopper windows are painted shut), we only lasted maybe fifteen minutes.
Lead paint? Oh I’m sure some of it is.
After Nate left and I took a break for lunch, I decided to finally assemble and adjust the “real” 3M mask I bought a few months ago. What a difference! It actually fits my face well, it seals so I don’t fog up my safety glasses, and, most importantly, I can actually breathe while in a cloud of paint dust.
I worked until around 6:00 PM. I could be scraping for the rest of my life… I’m trying to just scrape where it comes off relatively easily, but it’s hard to stop once you start working on an area. And as I got over towards the northwest corner, the wallpaper was laid over some kind of textured surface, which comes off as about an 1/8″ layer of blue powder. Drywall compound? Stucco? Concrete patching product? Asb— shhh, don’t say it. Don’t even think it.
2007.05.12
More scraping.
Dump Run