Demo Day

The roofing is done for now. We are dry inside, which is life changing. Time to start building on the second floor! But first, we must demolish some old parts of the building to make way for the new. The old office looked great when we first saw the building but over the years, the roof leaks have taken their toll. Also, the design we came up with doesn’t really work with that arrangement. We’ve salvaged a number of pieces of the casework, including the wood flat file for possible use elsewhere.

The dumpster showed up Friday.

Tom took the day off to get ready. The rig we previously used on the roof is set up on the second floor, extending out a front window.

This time we used buckets full of water for ballast instead of rubble. We have a lot of buckets.

The bucket and chain chute is hooked back up.

This time, instead of going straight down into the dumpster, it has an arc to reach over the sidewalk.

Test dump works

It proved challenging to keep the buckets together at all the overlaps- the heavy loads would cause them to pull apart, depositing the contents onto the sidewalk.

Tom grabbed a ladder and screwed them together as a temp fix, but next time we’re going to use a larger overlap. Because we’re on the second floor instead of the roof, we have plenty of buckets to use.

We had terrific helpers- Deanna and Rob! Together we were able to pull down the wall, all of the paneling and chunks of plaster.

Tom’s homage to sledgehammers

Thanks guys! We couldn’t have done it without you.

And we found a 1939 quarter.

We have some fine tuning to do tomorrow, but we got it all cleared out in a day- didn’t expect that! Now, where’s the ibuprofen?