Clearing the Stairway Walls, Part 2

The day began with some stupidity. Given all the work I’ve been doing with plaster and lathe, and nails everywhere… you’d think that I’d get hurt doing the demo work.

But this morning, as I was working on some work stuff… I reached down to adjust my chair, and somehow managed to get my finger in between two bits of plastic. As a result, a sliced a big line down my ring finger. With my freaking chair.

Luckily, the bleeding stopped pretty quickly. I was able to throw a bandaid on this, and had a fresh/new pair of gloves downstairs. For the remainder of the day, I ended up just keeping my gloves on while I worked, to minimize the amount of dust/dirt that would get in.

I thought briefly about wrapping my finger in duct tape, but decided against it. I don’t quite yet have Bob level skills in this area.

The first part of my day involved removing the lathe that was along the stairs, at eye-level. Made pretty short work of all this, and then got the scaffold set up again for the cleaning phase.

Frustratingly, I had a harder time today setting things up. Not sure why, but I had to struggle more to get things lined up.

Another moment of stupidity: yesterday, I noticed a bold at the base of the scaffold. I thought to myself: Hey, I wonder if I should be moving this up, to hold the deck more securely?

So this morning, I moved these bolts to hold down the bottom of the arms. Which worked great, until I lifted up the scaffold… and the casters promptly just fell off.

I guess those bolts were serving a different purpose.

After a few missteps, I got situated – and began using the shop vac to clear off any remaining insulation, and to clean the walls.

Walls, cleaned and cleared.

Top of the stairs, also cleaned and cleared.

After this step, the next phase was cleaning up – which was a total pain. I had a few bags in the office that I had to haul downstairs. Then I had to clean and shop vac the second floor. Then clean and shop vac the stairs. Then clean and shop vac the first floor hall. Then clean and shop vac the dining room. And then finally clean the stairs down to the basement.

I ended up finishing around 5:30, which wasn’t terrible. But I was pretty beat by this time.

A good, productive weekend working on the house. But boy, I really could use a weekend now, to recuperate.

Related:
Clearing the Stairway Walls, Part 1