Downtown Kay Town : October 2014

As we began to take the lath and pLaster off the ceiling, we discovered something that has been a pain ever since. On top of the lath and plaster is a fine dust, anywhere from an inch to two inches deep. As we would pull the plaster down, the dust would fall all over us, get in our eyes and make it hard to breath. We are not sure what the dust is and haven't had it tested, but... I think it might just be a gypsum powder that was spread on top of the ceiling, in the attic, to help insulate it. We wore our masks, and tried to get it all down quickly. We also realized that this dust would basically get everywhere!

The fuzziness in the picture is from the dust. Looking west from kitchen.

Because this dust was such a mess, I began to think that maybe we should just keep going on the demolition and get more of it done than we were originally planning on. I figured that since we had the dumpster there and we were already creating such a mess, we should go ahead and demo anything that we were going to need to remove for the final plan.

So... we continued to remove lath and plaster from walls and ceiling in all of the back area of the home as well as the bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchen in the center of the home. We even removed the lath and plaster from the north wall in the hallway.

This shows the North wall of the hall gone.

At this point, the only thing left was the south wall of the hallway that backed up to the fireplace. This is the first point that Clay and I have varying opinions about what should be done. Clay felt that we should leave the fireplace and beautiful wood work in the inglenook. I felt that we should remove the inglenook, take down the fireplace and demo the south wall of the hall to open it up and let the natural light shine in and through the whole home.

Looking east. Taking down all the walls between

the bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen space.

And... I got my way this time. We began taking apart the the benches and removing the marble from the face of the fireplace. We also climbed up into the attic and began removing the brick to bring down the chimney. The dropped ceiling in the inglenook had a whole lot more of the white dust on the top so we carefully tried to scoop off as much as we could and even tried to vacuum up quite a bit of it. We finally got it all taken apart. The benches were pretty much still intact, and we plan on reusing them in the home. The dropped panel ceiling was also removed and we will be reusing it in the dining room.

This is the South wall of the hallway, and the inglenook fireplace

is on the other side of this wall. Like the little storage cupboards on either side?

Kayden, Lydia and I went downstairs and removed the dumbwaiter closet. We found an the old library book and the 1903 Indian head penny as we were taking it apart.

This is where the dumbwaiter used to be located. Years ago they closed it in. We did find the pulley, though.

We also finished demo-ing the bathroom during this time. We took all the fixtures out to the driveway, including the bath tub, and Clay and our neighbor Mike were able to break up all the old tile and concrete from the bathroom floor.

We began removing old plumbing lines from the basement.