Further Work in the Living Room

After Isaac and I had our turn, the next day Troy joined in on the fun. I was out for errands in the morning, but came back to help out for the afternoon. By the time we quit, the ceiling was done and a lot of the walls were down too.

Looking SW (toward dining room)

Looking NW

On the outside walls there was a layer of 3/4" styofoam that was stuck to the plaster walls. The lathe and plaster had to come down, and then there was a lot of cellulose insulation, in some of the bays. Not enough to warm the room, but certainly plenty to make a mess. We have a mountain of garbage bags in the back waiting for future garbage days.

Looking SE

Looking NE

Apparently there was an outside door there at some point. It's the third one we've discovered (one in the kitchen and the one in the back room we opened up to use again).

I think this one supports my idea that the front of the house was built first and the rest was added on later because otherwise I can't imagine why you would put a door there. But my imagination may be limited. Oh wait, the best part about finding this door is that it is cardboard behind those 2x4s. And then there's siding. Yes between me and the out-of-doors was siding, cardboard, 3/4 syrofoam and paneling. That's just not enough in my book.

One guess on who installed the paneling:

We don't know who they are. I can only hope they lived here in the 70s because there's no other excuse for the paneling.

I just realized I'll never have paneling (like this stuff anyway) in my house again. This makes me happy.

A much more interesting find was this glass slide:

Troy knew that they were used in WWII to train people in identifying what were friendly aircraft or enemy aircraft. That way you knew whether to shoot them down.

Tom has been a big help this week as Troy has gone back to work and left Isaac to otherwise work alone. Tom and Isaac have cleared the rest of the lathe and plaster off the walls, cleaned and swept and cleaned some more, and Isaac caulked a lot of the cracks between the wall boards.

The plastic has had limited effect on the dust. Oh, I can believe in my head that it would have been worse without it, but it is bad. At first when we noticed the plastic blowing into the room (especially when we had the woodstove going), I thought this was a good thing--negative pressure, the dust won't blow out if the air is being sucked in. When we went to bed that night, we learned that all that "negative pressure" was caused by the warm air traveling through the hole in the ceiling around the stovepipe into our bedroom. Traveling with that warm air was a lot of dust. Everything is thickly coated, including the bed. It was horrible laying down the first night--every time you moved, the dust would get disturbed! The following day I covered the bed at least with a old flat sheet and that has helped.

It's all icky. But hopefully this is the worst of it for a while.