Partial Office Floor Demo

April 13, 2019

Busy day today! I was up early, with a few errands to run. First up, I headed down near Midway to hit up Harbor Freight to get a new Sawzall. Then I did some grocery shopping, and then stopped over to get my glasses adjusted (still not seeing close things well, but distant things are totally fine).

After that, I suited up and spent the rest of the afternoon working in the office. One of the things we need to do is open up the floor, and see what’s going on underneath – particularly in the NW corner, which sags a little.

Based on the floor, some repairs were done in this area. And we want to assess this area first, before tackling any demo in the living room (directly underneath). If there aren’t issues, we can potentially leave the living room ceiling in place; if there are issues, it may be best to demo the living room ceiling as well.

We had several large pieces of wood stored here, so first thing was to relocate a lot of material. Shuffle shuffle shuffle.

The new sawzall, getting a little workout.

A few more tools in the mix. I now have a standard kit for pulling up floorboards. The sawzall keeps the pieces a certain length. The crowbar is for popping up each piece. The hammer is to pull out the nails. And the Channellocks are for when the nail heads pop off, and I need to try to pry the nail out manually.

A slow but steady process. I cut maybe 8-10 boards, spanning about three joists. Then I pull them all up, and go about prying up all the nails. It’s methodical, and gives me enough room to remove all the nails without needing to straddle and balance over the joists.

Knowing that with the floors up, we’ll likely be walking across the joists… I try to be really vigilant about finding and removing all nails. It just takes one errant nail to snag your shoe as you’re walking. The last thing I want is someone tripping while trying to skip across joists.

Most of what I focused on was remoivng the floorboards. So I left all the debris within the joists for another time. I did happen to see that some of debris I came across was actually old bits of newspaper.

A “Wanted” ad, looking for stenographers. At first, I thought “Bunte Brothers” was some kind of law office… but it turns out they were confectioners? I need to learn and read up more about this!

More jobs for stenographers. I like that the job posting at the top is located at State and Jackson.

There is a surprising amount of “urgency” for pianos.

After looking around for more scraps, I did find a portion of the newspaper that contained a date. Looks like August 25, 1948.

Which makes these scraps I found nearly 71 years old!

As I was cutting, I ran across some resistance. After clearing away more boards, I found this one sistered joist.

Yikes. I mean… yikes.

It’s sistered, but doesn’t really look like it’s doing all that much. Looking at the damage, I’m not sure what happened here – a fire? Given how close it is to an old (no longer active) gas line, Liz figured a fire.

Not bad for an afternoon’s work. While this was more exploratory than anything else, it still felt nice to do some actual house work and progress things along, just a little bit.