| During the gutting process I found the front south corner stud was rotten and filled with termites and lady bugs. Normally replacing this post would be easy, however with this being a balloon house and the post being a corner support it became a little more involved than I could do with my tools and only one set of hands. Once again Julian to the rescue. Julian and his guys cut the stud out from the top of the second floor down to the foundation and replaced it with a new corner stud. It seems this damage was caused by water leaking in from the roof over years of neglect. Another area of rotten wood that I am fixing myself is the doorway below the bathroom. This area had been soaking in, well, you guessed it. The smell was horrendous when I pulled off the plaster and door frame. After a couple of trips outside for fresh air I was able to remove the material in question. I will go back and re frame this area when I get to that part of the project. The electrician is scheduled to put a new service in on February 5th. In order for him to do this I needed to give him a clear area to run the new lines and the new service box. So on Saturday evening after work I was up on staging pulling off aluminum siding. While I was doing this I reached back to grab the scaffolding and mistook the electrical wire from the street as a staging bar and grabbed it. Good thing those lines were well insulated or my last entry into this website would have been prior to this one. During this project I meet one of my neighbors Ruth Bryant. She use to live in my house at one time and she stopped and talked to me along with her brother.. They were able to give me some insight about the house. They believe that John Bryant who signed the back of all the molding was their Great Grandfather and that she had read somewhere that they moved into the house sometime in January of 1877. This is a lot older than the recent owners had stated on the buyers disclosure. They had said the house was built in 1930. The age that Ruth claims makes a lot more sense than the 1930 age based on the structure and the electrical system. I still have more siding to take down from the house however none of it is near any electrical wires. DAY 140 It has been an abnormally warm winter and we decided to take advantage of this weather on Super Bowl Sunday by taking most of the aluminum siding down. Julian still had his staging up on the gable sides of the house so Pattie and I worked on pulling down the siding. That was until she ran into a huge group of sleepy hornets behind the siding and decided that she did not want to do this part of the job up on staging. So she moved down to the ground and worked on the front of the house and left the bugs to me.There has been a tremendous amount of bugs found in this house, especially between the aluminum siding and the original clapboards (I hate bugs) Later that afternoon the electrician came to hook up the new service while I returned to gutting interior walls. Despite working on other projects lately I am still ahead of schedule on the gutting process and hope to be finished by the 20th of February. On February 7th CMP came and hooked up the power to our new service so now I can tear out electrical wires without worry. I hope to have the wood shop in the large barn re wired this coming Sunday. February 20, 2006 Day 161 If you heard a loud scream of celebration on the evening of February 19th it was me as I knocked down the last piece of plaster in the house.While I still have about a week left of removing baseboards, insulation and nails, the basic gutting of the house is finally finished. It will be a long time before I think about gutting a plaster wall again. We still need to gut some old moldy insulation from the barn before we can send the dumpster back to its owners but the work left seems minor compared to the past two months. The largest part of the project was clearing the broken plaster out of the house. I built a 16 foot long chute which I ran from the second floor down to the dumpster.I then put the trash can on rollers and this way I could fill the trash can half full instead of a third full. This was much quicker then when I was carrying it to the dumpster as I did on the first floor.I would then roll the trash can to the window and then dump it down the chute. I was able to get three loads dumped every 5 minutes. I did this for six hours straight one Sunday and removed three room fulls of debris. I calculated that I had removed 40 yards of plaster out of the house. This translates to over 600 trips to the dumpster. With the end of the gutting process clearly insight I have a renewed outlook on the project and can not wait to get started putting in the new window frames and installing the windows. |
| The Process cont. pg. 3 |
| March 13, 2006 It has been twenty one days since my last entry. During this time we gutted most of the old insulation from the barn. There is still more to go but I wanted to begin putting the house back together so the rest of the barn can wait until another day.It was a happy day when they came and took the dumpster away. The electrician started wiring my workshop in the barn basement and I have completed putting the saws together and setting up the shop. It is my newest pride and joy. A thirty foot long workbench along with plenty of room for my saws and an outlet for each of them. |