Week 1 of demo is complete! That also means we made it through our first week living and surviving in a new home and a new town, woot woot! We may need to make a liquor store run verrrrry soon, but that is neither here nor there. 😊 But for real, our first week with our home reno project was just as amazing as we hoped. Our kids are the real MVPs, we are so proud of them and how they have adjusted to this major life change! They are in heaven being so close to family, and they are loving the great outdoors and having so much space to run and play in rural America.
Ever since meeting with the movers we have a triage list of things that must be completed before the house can be moved. Priorities #1, 2, & 3 are; #1) cleaning out the basement, it must be completely empty of EVERYTHING so the movers can get down there and have full access to the house in order to jack it up and move it onto their trailer, #2) ripping off the back closed in porch, and #3) ripping off the entire front porch. We focused our efforts this past week on getting the basement cleaned up and tearing down the back porch. Our first few days of demo were exciting, but honestly a little lack-luster in the before/after aspect of renovation expectations. It was a satisfying project for us because we know how important getting that space cleared is to the movers, but it wasn’t exactly the “smash and destroy” demolition project that is so highly sought after in renovation projects. None the less, we were very pleased that after only roughly half a day we had the basement almost completely cleared and ready for movers. We spent a few hours grinding and cutting every pipe we could get our hands on. When the movers lift our house off its current foundation they need all piping and tubing, vents and telephone lines, electrical wires and all other lines connected to the underside of house GONE. Any guesses on how many things are connected to the underside of a 107-year-old house? We did not keep exact count, but it was somewhere in the hundreds, maybe millions, and seemed at times like we would never quit cutting pipes and old telephone lines! But, when the dust settled, we had cleared all but an old furnace boiler and a few lines that are in a crawl space.
Next, we started on to the back porch. Somewhere in the 50s we think that the back porch was added to the house to bring a washer/dryer laundry into the home. We started by clearing out old cabinets and the washer/dryer that was still there. We recruited my brother-in-law and a few of my nieces and nephews to help us smash walls and take off exterior siding.
We did not get the entire structure tore down, but we have exposed all the walls and are ready to start tearing at the ceiling next. When we were tearing off the sheetrock behind the washer we ran across old newspaper clippings that had been used as insulation filling at the base of the floor. One of the dates on the paper was from October, 1959. We are so excited to find old treasures like this in the walls, and we cannot wait to see what else we might find!
The front porch has not been touched yet. We are hoping that in the next few weeks we can recruit my father and/or brother to hook onto the front porch with a tractor and pull it off the house. Should save us a lot of work if they can just rip it from the home in one fell swoop….famous last words, ‘SHOULD save us a lot of work’!
