October 7, 2015
Spent two hours last night, working in the basement. This second wall of bricks is coming down much faster, as there seem to be fewer “full” bricks, and fewer bricks overall. At a few points, I took to pounding out the bricks directly, versus chiseling the mortar, which helped speed things along.
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October 4, 2015
Today, Julie and Bob stopped over to help us with the house. Outside, Julie and Liz were at work on the parkway. Inside, Bob was taking measurements and making plans while I was in the basement, continuing to work on removing bricks from the chimney.
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October 3, 2015
I slowly discovered that hitting the chisel on an angle made things easier. As did brushing out all the debris before each set of blows. I also got to learn how to chisel away exposed mortar much faster… and to also use the chisel as a lever, to further loosen (and in some cases pry out) bricks.
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September 30, 2015
It’s hard to see – but just inside each of the cut lines, there’s a small chisel mark. I added these per Bob’s instructions, on bricks that overlapped the cut line. As I understand it, these cuts help introduce a point of weakness prior to the cut line, to lessen the chance of the bricks breaking at a point past the cut line. Not a guarantee, but something to help minimize the chance of that happening.
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September 27, 2015
I got to watch Bob start us off, in removing the intial bricks. And I’ve got some good instructions on how to best proceed with the removal. This looks to be another joint project that Liz and I will undertake, which hopefully we can get done in the coming week.
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September 23, 2015
The time during (and leading up to) our vacation overseas was really lovely, and a lovely escape. But now that we’re back and resettled again, I think both Liz and I are hoping to get back on a more consistent schedule in terms of house work.
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March 28, 2015
Spent Saturday doing a little more work on the house. While Liz was cleaning up the first floor bathroom (vacuuming debris and taking out nails), I was busting out the exterior wall along the stairs that lead to the basement. I was skeptical that any insulation was in the walls (because it’s missing from literally every other wall in the…
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February 10, 2015
This is several days old, but wanted to post up a few more photos of the clean(er) basement. It’s a very gradual thing, but it’s still exiting to see more of the floor again.
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January 19, 2015
The SW corner of the basement, tidied-up a bit more. The mule (pipe-threading machine) will stay here for a bit longer still, so that guy remains in place for now.
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January 17, 2015
Seeing wall to ceiling insulation on the South wall was really something to behold. I have to admit – I got a little teary-eyed, seeing so much up. Perhaps, when the true winter kicks in again, this room will fare a bit better against the chill.
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January 11, 2015
On Sunday, Bob and Julie came over to help us work on the house. Here they are with Liz, down in the basement going over future plans.
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January 8, 2015
At the end of the day, we prepped the house to prevent the pipes from freezing. I’ve gone through this process a few times with Bob, but he checked in on us during the afternoon and gave me another walkthrough. There’s not a lot to it, but it was helpful to have him go over the steps one more time since I would be doing it on my own.
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January 6, 2015
This morning, around 4:45 AM, I woke up to the sound of water running. Which was weird, because we didn’t leave anything running when we went to sleep. As I started to wake up, it struck me that the sound was not just of water running, but of significant water running.
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December 31, 2014
On Wednesday, during her day off, Liz spent a lot of the afternoon working on the house. She talked with Bob at length the day before, and we now have a revised plan on what we need to tackle. The basement and upstairs are now higher up on the list than we previously thought.
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December 28, 2014
After our day of slothful decadence yesterday, Liz and I actually got out of bed and did some work around the house. I headed up to the attic, while Liz settled in to work in the basement.
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