The backyard has really bloomed, following the rains these past few weeks. We set up an old bird bath a few weeks ago, and at the time… the ground was pretty barren given all the work that took place, when we had ” target=”_blank”>the trees removed.
Today, I set aside the morning to move a lot of the bags that have accumulated with our recent kitchen work. On Friday, while we were cleaning up the kitchen, I ended up moving a lot of bags into the backyard. Today, my plan was to get every bag we had into yet another Bagster bag.
Downstairs, Liz was working on the kitchen, tearing pu the plywood floor. There are actually a few layers here in the kitchen, and she was tackling the topmost. On walking in, I didn’t realize the full extent of what she had done. The floor was even, and it took me a few seconds to realize that she had removed an entire layer of the floor.
On Friday, Liz and I made another pass of the kitchen. We cleaned off a lot of the remaining plaster, hauled a lot of bags out in the yard, and removed all the nails we could find.
With all of the work going on in the house, we have (unfortunately) a small pile of debris building in the backyard. Mostly it’s excess wood, old cabinets, and things that I’m slowly getting rid of via the weekly trash pickups.
A view of the back attic – there’s a large area that opens to the left, just past the chimney/brick. The light didn’t really extend very far, so I kind of had to make do (next time, I’ll be using a headlight).
In a few spots, there are planks of wood which look like tongue and groove floorboards. They’re not really set into the ceiling, as much as they are kind of laid across side by side. The wood is easy to remove, but it’s the massive amount of debris and sawdust that’s sitting on top that’s the big pain in the butt…
To get rid of it all, I stuffed as much as I could into trash bags. At first, I started cutting it with my knife. After maybe 20 minutes, I gave up on that and just kind of embraced the fact that I’d be swimming in all the squirrel poop. After I left the “cut the insulation into squares” approach, I just started to stuff as much as I could into each bag.
Thankfully, the wire mesh is almost all gone now. The side of the kitchen has been removed of all mesh, plaster, and wooden lathes. The ceiling is all clear save one strip of wire mesh, containing the overhead light. I just now have one half of the back wall to demo (plus a decent amount of clean-up to do), and all the demo in the kitchen should be completed.
The tongue and groove layer is all southern yellow pine, according to Bob. And you should have seen the way his eyes lit up, when he talked about this. Apparently, it’s completely un-treated southern yellow pine. Which would make it ideal material for other elements of the house (rosettes, trim) or even other projects entirely.
So far, I’ve had my computer set up in the back bedroom – and it’s been nice to have a place to go that isn’t either the bed or the dining room table. For Liz though, she hasn’t had her own space until now.
As we were discussing things we could do with the yard (probably next year), we decided to take an old bird bath and place it back in the yard. There’s a small bit of cement in the middle of the yard, where it possibly may have resided before we moved in.
From time to time, I’d see the holes in the fingers and became a little proud at their wear. I was reminded of an old fairy-tale: East of the Sun, West of the Moon. In the story, the main character goes in search of a prince in a far away land, somewhere “east of the sun, west of the moon.” In order to get there, one of the things she must do is to wear out seven pairs of iron shoes.
One in particular was this massive guy, protruding from our yard and hovering well over in the neighbor’s yard. It’s hard to really do justice to the scale of the thing, but on first seeing it… Liz and I were both concerned regarding the potential damage it might do to the neighbor’s house (and ours).
Both stations are about the same distance from our new house, and though we walked home from here yesterday… neither one of us realized how truly close we were to the Museum of Science and Industry!