Clearing the Stairway Walls, Part 1

October 20, 2018

While I was able to get to some of the demo in our stairwell, there’s a good amount of plaster and lathe that’s difficult to reach – and requires a scaffold. Luckily for us, Bob has such a thing (we’re so fortunate to be able to tap Bob’s awesome arsenal of tools/machines/gadgets).

To help reach those really far up spots, Bob’s Baker scaffold is just what we needed.

Wow – random discovery: the last time the Baker scaffold was here at the house was back in 2013.

This was interesting to set up solo, but I was able to do it without too much difficulty.

I had to adjust things down one stair step from where I originally had things, but beyond that – it was perfect!

Here’s the section of plaster and lathe that I needed to reach.

Here’s the scaffold with the deck down. Here is also the exact moment when I realized that I left my coffee downstairs.

Yes, I pulled the thing up, just so I could go get my coffee. Sigh.

The process for me involved doing some demo, pushing all the debris down over the side of the scaffold… then going down to clean up the debris after a while.

I think I could have done all the demo in one shot, but I was overly worried about the plaster adding too much weight to the stairs. I’m pretty sure it would have been fine, but I felt/worked better this way: demo a little, clean a little, then repeat.

Around this time, Liz sent me a photo update.

Level up! In order to reach some of the plaster high up, the scaffold wasn’t enough. This was a little tricky, in that there are some holes in the deck. And the width of the ladder is just shy of the width of the deck. But I moved slowly and carefully, and had no problems.

I’m seeing double here: four ladders!

Getting to some of the higher plaster involved not one, but two ladders. For the most part, I was able to reach everything using the ladder on the right. But from time to time, I’d straddle between both.

The width of the hallway was also a little tight, and so the scaffold served as a kind of crude safety measure. If I somehow fell from the hallway ladder, at least I’d have my fall broken a little earlier with the scaffold.

More debris.

Plaster getting cleared, but a whole lot of lathe left. Reminded me a bit of the bedroom demo day, a while back.

A view from the first floor. To get down here, I just needed to remove the deck. And then I climbed down, and squeezed between the wall and the frame.

Starting in on the lathe. One horrible part of this job was the old/dirty insulation that dropped down from the attic. Oh man, what horrible memories this brings back.

All that gross stuff just rained down.

Oh dirty attic insulation, I could have sworn we were all done with you. But I guess not.

This was… not pleasant. Removing the lathe unleashed a shower of this stuff. And that also meant I had to clean all of this, all the way down the stairs.

The top stairwell wall, cleared. While I removed the lathe, I also removed all the nails as well. Took a bit of time, but made sense to do that while the scaffolding and ladders were set up.

Taking a break. The unfortunate part of all this is that I need to clean my way to freedom.

More lathe removed.

I got through the top part of the straight wall along the stairs… but decided I needed to call things, and left the lathe below the second floor for tomorrow. With a good deal of cleaning still ahead, I decided to leave a few things for the next day.