Posts Tagged "basement"

Basement Night

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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Inside, Outside: Work on the Basement and Parkway

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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Cutting into the Chimney Bricks in the Basement

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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Basement Bricks

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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Basement Clearing

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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Bathroom and Basement Demo

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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More Basement Cleaning

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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Reorganization and Final Kitchen Fixes

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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Draining the Pipes

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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Waking Up to the Sound of Running Water

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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New Insulation in the Basement

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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