Demolition

My long time friend, Scott Volski, Scott Builders gave us a call the following Monday. He wanted to start the demolition on Wednesday by gutting the upstairs. The only problem was that we still had a lot of storage up there including 3 dressers, a drafting board, and lots of clothes. We had already rented a storage unit and started moving stuff in there. The challenge was to empty the upstairs by Wednesday, September 1. Scott has 2 men working with him, Fred and Mike. The 3 of them did about 80% of it in 2 days. We did have a few surprises. There was another old roof below the existing roof. It was badly charred from a fire. I had seen other evidence of a fire, but this was the worst that I had seen so far.

the black ceiling beams on the right were burned in a fire around 1949. very little of the burned wood was removed after the fire, they built around it.

It must have happened before the previous owner (Maslow) in the Ambruster years, or possibly earlier. The other discovery was that the existing living room ceiling was framed with 3"x4" lumber on the flat. The sheet rock was fastened to furring strips below. The whole mess has got to go, the beams are 20% burned.

Under the old first floor bedroom, the windows at the far right above (see previous picture), was a crawl space. I had planned on extending the workshop slab into this area after it was dug out. It would have been a low ceiling, about 5 foot, but it was only going to be for storage. To allow the bobcat access to dig, the bedroom had to de demolished first. They started on the inside, then ripped out the floor, roof, and then the walls. It was a lot of dirty work. See Fred, Mike, and Scott.