Next on my home improvement projects was taking down the old chimney that went from the basement up through the attic. It was previously used for the coal stove in the basement and for the wood burning oven in the kitchen. The previous owners had boxed it in and then capped it off in the attic.
My first project was to enter the attic ponywall and take down the chimney brick by brick. The ceramic liner was too small so I wasn’t able to drop bricks down. Instead, I took down a good 30 buckets of bricks down the two flights of stairs.
For the second and final phase of the project, I enlisted three great friends. The night before, I plastic wrapped the kitchen channeling my inner Dexter Morgan. We removed the two sides of lath and plaster (a very dusty and nasty effort). A few snips with the sawzall and we removed the studs holding up the wall.
Brick by brick, we slowly chipped away at the chimney and dumped the bricks out the side door in buckets. Here’s Ben and Hsu Han hard at work. I was up in the attic chipping away at the bricks further in the back.
In the end, we build a pile of bricks on the side yard. Thank you to my neighbor Chris for lending his driveway for our effort. In between our demo effort, we helped my neighbor raise up his workshop in the back yard. The men lifted four walls and nailed them down with the nail gun.
Lessons learned:
- Borrow a fan to blow out the dust. We were working in a cloud of dust.
- Plastic wrap the workspace to protect living space, but don’t wrap yourself out of the kitchen so you can’t get access to water.
- Take lots of breaks but keep the momentum going.
- There’s nothing you can’t accomplish if you put your minds to it.
- We’re not as young as we used to be.
Thank you to Ben, Hsu Han, and Kris. After a long week of white collar work, we put on our blue collars and went to work.