Plaster Demolition

Well I thought I had better get an entry in early, before everyone gets too used to Danielle’s chipper style. I wanted to call our blog “7307 Lindbergh: Wrestling with an Angel” but D said no. Without an explanation. Sheesh.

This is a big project. Not crazy, not unrealistic…but, big. I felt sobered when I took a look just now at the “before” pictures. They make it look like a perfectly fine house to begin with. So, uh, why did we just decide to spirit away a third of the overall mass of our dwelling as purchased?

Turns out there are a lot of good reasons. Here are some of them.

Removing all the plaster in one swell foop permits us to…

1. Stop worrying, forever, about rotten ceiling keys and collapsed plaster ceilings.
2. NOT embark on the plaster-repair learning curve. Choosing our battles.
3. Make all the ugly dusty mess now, at once, and never again. Our proposed changes to the floorplan are evolving as we learn more about the space, and I don’t want to re-enter the demolition phase later because our needs or minds have changed.
4. Learn about the mechanical/electrical systems. This is an old house with surprise caches of asbestos-rich insulation, living out the choices of innumerable tradesmen and owners over the past 115 years. There is unlimited potential for foolishness and we’d like to know about everything, right now, please and thank you. 
5. Simplify the mechanical systems in place (e.g. we do not need four separate heating systems, that is radiators, a gas furnace, and two heat pumps) and also re-wire to our heart’s content. There is knob-and-tube, black iron conduit, cloth-insulated, BX, and several different generations of Romex wiring. We…want one kind. With connections in junction boxes. If anything is in good shape, we’d like to see it and integrate it…otherwise goodbye.
6. Learn about any strange choices made by the good ol’ boys who framed this house. And evaluate the quality of repairs made at different points—important, given the evidence in the basement and attic for a significant fire at some point in the house’s history. 
7. Total plaster removal will let us air-seal and insulate from the inside, significantly easier and safer than working outside the building. (To date the only insulation we have found in the house is a handful of fiberglass batts above the bathroom and three 20gallon trashbags of rags and wadded-up newspapers stuffed in the wall behind the cast-iron tub—with dates from 1915.)

So there it is for starters. But to be totally frank there is one reason that supersedes all the rest (maybe it encompasses the other reasons? Or is it separate?) And that is because I had an itch to tear out the plaster, do a bit of proper hack-and-slash, some thinking with my hands, and see what we have got, what little crumbs (and turds) have fallen off of history’s table and onto our own.

Here are some pictures of the process. Stay tuned for another post with some of the historic artifacts that we found during the demo process.

*** written by Nathan ***

Nathan built a chute from the second floor to the dumpster, so that we didn't have to carry what turned out to be about 15 tons of plaster and lathe out of the house.

Inside the second story window, Nathan created a ramp up to the chute, where he could wheel a wheelbarrow up and dump it into the chute. In a perfect world, the debris would then just tumble down into the dumpster, but the dumpster company ended up giving us a bigger dumpster than we had ordered (which ended up being a good thing), which meant that the chute wasn't quite steep enough for the debris to fall without assistance. So, Nathan fashioned a long "plunger" (which is leaning on the window frame in this picture) to push the debris down the chute. A lot of work, but still much better than carrying buckets of plaster down the stairs.



Behind the plaster are many small strips of wood called lath; when the plaster is originally put on the walls, the plasterer presses the plaster through the gaps in the lath. It oozes through and then hardens, holding the plaster to the wall with the little bits of plaster that have dried on the back side of the lath -- these are called keys.

Removing the plaster from the first wall was the hardest -- we hadn't figured out the efficiencies yet. After we removed this first wall, we had access to the backside of the wall on the other side, and could break of the keys with a hammer, and hit the plaster from the backside, making it fall into a wheelbarrow that we had positioned on the other side to catch the falling plaster.

You can see some of the old knob and tube wiring in this picture, which we are going to remove. The porcelain knobs are really sharp when they break, so we'll need to be careful when we remove them.

The textured pieces you can see hanging from the ceiling are the remnants of the keys (little bits of plaster) that held the plaster ceiling in place. On a wall, the keys usually fall down into the stud cavity when you break them, so you have a pile of them at the bottom. But, on the ceiling, they have nowhere to go, so they just hang down like little boogers, and sometimes fall on your head when you're not expecting it.

In the bathroom, we discovered a false wall that revealed additional space in the bathroom -- in the picture below, we had already demoed the wall that was immediately behind the toilet, only to discover this yellow laminate tile wall set about a foot back. You can see the exposed floor joists for the "in between" space that was hidden between the two walls.

As you can see, the plaster removal process creates a MESS, and we were completely covered in plaster dust at the end of each day. So, naturally, we needed to take a "bath" in our "finished" bathroom...

As it turned out, the brick fireplace mantel/surround wasn't really attached to...anything. We didn't really like it anyway, and since it could tip over and really hurt someone, we decided to remove it...

Over the course of 2 weeks, we filled a 40 yard dumpster and a 30 yard dumpster with plaster, lath, and other debris, totaling about 15 tons (30,000 lbs).