Bombing the Bathroom

It's been a long week and as you can tell I've been pretty busy. The bathroom has been the focus this week since it's really all that is left in the major construction picture.

So, after cleaning up the mess from the weekend Monday and Tuesday, I dug into the bathroom on Wednesday night. I quickly found that Travis's work over the holidays eased the process since most of what was left was plaster on lath and some tile on tileboard.

The shower wall proved to be the most difficult as the tile was on a greenboard and cementboard in some places.

Friday night I finished up the demo and Saturday was spent bagging what was left up and working on electrical and insulation. Sunday was more electrical which resulted in two trips to Home Depot which took forever compliments of slow work on the A train.

I woke up early today to tidy things up and get ready for Roy to help me hand the ceiling drywall. It took us 2 hours to cut the drywall and hang it with the main challenge being working in such a small space with one person on a ladder in the bath tub, another on a sawhorse and attempting to vault it up around corners and over the steam pipe.

After a bit of struggling, we got it all into place and it feels good to have gone from demo to insulated, re-wired with a ceiling in less then a week.

Still, there is a lot of work to do so I can get a sink back and not have to take baths (I've never taken so many baths in my life as I have this week!). It looks like the plumbing for the bath tub will need to be replaced and the subfloor has holes and oddities around the edges.



I have a few contractors coming this week to look at these elements and give their opinion.

In the meantime, I'll haul the bombed out debris to the curb each night this week and shop for tiles.

This is where I poop

Enough said for now.

Dumpster Day

Work has kept me at a distance from the renovation although I can't complain about a week in Los Angeles.

Before I left I ensured I had a dumpster rented for a few days of cleaning out the trash. Although it is easy to rent a dumpster, there are a lot of rules and regulations that I had to work around and just take the risk of breaking them. I'll spare you the details, but do enquire if you are interested.

I flew into NYC on Thursday morning, a bit tired from the work week and the red eye flight. I took a light nap while waiting for a phone call from the dumpster dude to arrive. I slept through alternate side parking and went outside at 12:30 PM to make sure it had been placed on the SW corner of Cabrini and 181st. I smiled when I saw the beautiful 5' high, 12' long, 7' wide, empty 15 cubic yard dumpster. It was all mine!!!

Although I had the New York Yacht Club awards ceremony to attend in the evening, I thought I'd make a few trips and throw some bags of plaster in just to stake my claim. After 15 bags, it was time to jet.

Friday, a bit hung over and tired, I was eager to begin work after a few morning meetings. Just after the meetings, the elevator broke and trash time was on hold. Just my luck! Take a day off of work and now I'm stuck in my apartment 6 flights up with a load of trash!

I ran some errands and it still wasn't fixed. My neighbor was also doing a bit of renovation work and asked to throw some plaster in there. He offered money and I grabbed $50 from the deal, helping to defer the $550 fee for the dumpster.

Just after 1 PM the elevator was back online. I immediately started taking bags out to the courtyard with a flat cart and lined them up in anticipation of help from volunteers.

By 3 PM, I had 90% of all the bags in the courtyard. Jen, Brian and Alyssa arrived around 3:30. Brian and I tackled throwing the bags into the dumpster while Alyssa and Jen bagged up the lathe and kitchen floor.

By 5:30 PM, everything was in the dumpster and it was about 2/3 full!


I celebrated with a photo finish....


and then I took everyone out for dinner and drinks.

Dad and Uncle Steve are flying in tomorrow and we plan to tackle lots of wiring tasks. Stay tuned for more blogging...

Dirty Demo Days

I was almost convinced earlier this week that demolition isn't too bad. Then I started in on the ceiling this weekend. The long evenings earlier this weekend definitely paid off and I was glad that I didn't have to deal with the walls. Yet, the wall area didn't quite equate to the total ceiling area.

Despite the large task at hand and lacking troops to help, I dug in at 9 AM on Saturday chipping away at the plaster. Jen came around 1 PM just as I was loosing some steam and revitalized me with a breakfast sandwich. We continued to work and by 5:30 PM the ceiling was down.

Today was more of a cleanup day, having given the dust a day to settle and just the need to not live in a construction site. After 4 hours most everything was spick and span and 2/3 of the kitchen floor was ripped up (I plan on replacing this with oak to match the living room floor).


The worst part about the demo was tearing down the lath. There was a lot of dust and debris in the ceiling void compared to the wall. The air was thick and my hair was disgusting. Black water was pouring off of me for 10 minutes in the shower! I don't remember it being so bad when I did the bedroom, but maybe that's because I just tore into the walls and ceiling ruthlessly and expected the mess.

Anyhow, I'm super glad this part is done in just two short weekends. The bathroom is the only room left to be demolished.

The bags of plaster and wood are stacked up ready to go. I was hoping to rent a dumpster this weekend but didn't have the troops to back it up, so will schedule that date soon.


Oh, and don't forget to take in the spirit of all this with the new portrait.

Shafted!

I came home from work with the mission to do some demo tonight and decided to take the kitchen wall down. With a plumbing riser full of gas, hot water, cold water and drain pipes, I figured that it was best I tackle this one on my own so that if I busted a pipe there was only myself to blame.

You've seen the plaster, brick and lathe pics so I'll spare you. After getting the plaster off the lath, I noticed an area of water damage on the column. I chiseled at it once, twice and the third time was a charm. To my surprise a hole magically appeared. The column was also a shaft way! Shafted!

Cool outside air came pouring out the hole. The rest of the plaster on the brick came off extremely easily.


I'm not sure what to do with this find. It clearly created a pressurization of the plaster facing, causing it to come off very easily. I can only imagine at one point the hole and shaft way was use to vent stoves. Can I re-use it for a vent hood? How should I seal it up? I'll have to hunt for the answers to these questions.

Anyhow, I finished up the demo on the kitchen wall. One more small wall section to go and the ceiling. I'm guessing the ceiling will be about 60ish bags of plaster and lathe.

Tile Treasures...and a beer

Having worked hard during the week to clear out the remainder of living room items, the weekend was filled with demolition. After making a huge mess earlier this year, I've gotten a bit smarter about deconstructing the plaster walls. Although more fun to swing the crowbar and take out a huge chunk in one swipe, it creates a lot of dust, makes a huge mess and is noisy...not good when you have neighbors in close proximity.

So the plaster was slowly pried off the lathe, bagged, removed the lathe, took out the nails and bagged it. In addition to the mess reduction, this was also a good technique since there are now a lot of pipes to be dealt with, particularly on the bathroom wall.

The most interesting and annoying part of the demolition was the amount of debris found underneath the tub. Left over tiles, chunks of plaster and a random Schafer beer can (date TBD) were the majority of the bits and bobs.



In addition to wall demolition, I tackled the kitchen cabinets too. I was able to take down all the wall cabinets with ease. What a crappy installation job. Here's the before and after.


At the end of the day, there were 36 bags of plaster, lathe and a few bundles of wood. Monday night will mark the beginning of taking out the trash again.

I've established a schedule (to be posted in the next entry) and the next few weeks will require a lot of work, but I'm ready to tackle it and move this project forward quickly.

The weekend was rounded out with some fun at The Blaze, a festival with 4000 carved pumpkins. This picture reminded me of my apartment and the blog....there's more to see, even if it kills me.

No show

There haven't been many disappointments in this project so far and the ones that have jumped up have been very minor.

This past week/weekend I had my first major disappointment - the floor contractor no showed and didn't return my messages.

Now many of you might be saying "typical contractor" right about now, and I agree to an extent. It just seems super odd that someone with great references, who called me back promptly and gave a decent estimate would do such a thing. I can only believe that something catastrophic happened since his wife runs the business with him and she didn't call back either.

After 5 days of phone calls and waiting I've given up. It was somewhat of a toss up to do the floors now anyhow, the real advantage being that I would get the closets back. Yet, I would be stretching money a bit right now and I'm still moving stuff back and forth between rooms. Maybe it was for the best.

To keep things moving forward I began the task of clearing out the living room and moving everything back into the bedroom last night. I hope to start demolition this weekend and get the walls and some of the kitchen cabinets done, leaving the ceiling and the rest of the kitchen for next weekend.

Organizing Trash

After waking up at 7 AM and working for 5 hours straight, I have organized my mountain of bagged plaster. It was driving me nuts. I couldn't use the bedroom to put anything in there (specifically laundry to dry). After twist tying bags of plaster vacuuming the floor and then doing a final mop, it's starting to feel a bit normal again...if you ignore the open ceiling and walls, but hey, I can dream. The trash load ups should go much quicker now, which will be well appreciated since I've been doing them at 11:30 PM recently. The little Radio Cart can only handle three bags of plaster at a time, so its always 2 trips at least, which takes me 15 - 25 minutes depending on elevator traffic.

Besides organizing the trash, I made little bits of progress today. Most of the closet floor tiles were scraped up. I removed all the nails from the moldings, cut them up and bundled them to be placed on the curb.

I also made headway on taking the plaster off the brick. It took me a good 20 minutes to figure out the best technique. The secret was to make sure the edge of the plaster is scraped so that it is perpendicular to the face of the brick. A mini sledge and a flat bar are the other key elements. Put the flat bar wedge on the plaster/brick and pound away, watching the chunks easily come off. The downside is that the noise of the flat bar/brick interaction reverberates in the whole hallway....not such a good idea on a Sunday, so I didn't take it all off.


I didn't tackle the lath today and I'm hoping to do that with a friend. It's not fun on your own removing all those nails.

Tomorrow is trash day...again.

The Great Wall of China wasn't Built in One Day

The trash pile has been slowly dwindling in the bedroom. I've been very diligent about taking out 6 bags of plaster three nights a week. There's been a few nights where I could only take out two or three due to other bulk items the building put out, but so it goes. I was pretty excited this week when I was able to see the floor again where one area of trash bags was. Yet, my engineering mind quickly took over and I distributed the remaining bags for 'structural safety'

Dad came into town this weekend to see my brother (in from SF) and I. We finished taking down the plaster in the corner of the bedroom...managing to fill up at least another 12 - 18 bags of plaster and creating a pile of lath with nails. So much for that extra space on the floor.

At this point I have no idea how many bags of plaster there are and I can only gauge the rough number based on the stack of twist ties I have. At least it's all off the wall though. I'll be consistent in taking out six bags three nights per week. As they say, the Great Wall of China wasn't built in one day.

The five hours we spent on the bit of demolition that was left was more then enough for the weekend. I need to get out of this tiny space. We'll see what progress we can make next weekend.

Bags, Bags & More Bags!

There are 130 bags of plaster + lath sitting in my bedroom right now. After two solid days of work with my Dad, we're not doing anymore. It's unbelievable how dense this stuff is. You can really only put three coal shovel scoops into a bag and it is just managable to pick up. Heavy heavy stuff. I didn't quite demo the whole bedroom, but the little bit left is nothing to fret about and can be done easily later.

I'm a little worried about the structural load of all this on my floor, but that's why I have insurance I guess. I've spread it all out and plan to take some out every other night for the trash pickup. My garbage truck contact is going to come next week and give me an estimate to haul this all away, but I figure it's going to be out of my budget at the moment, so I will probably risk the city sanitation route for now.

This old construction is really interesting to me. The wooden beams look to be in good shape and there are a few spots where there is clearly some water damage, but hopefully the co-op stops dragging their feet and we get started on the roof soon. I find the combination of metal and wood lath in the bathroom oddly fascinating too.


All in all, we worked super hard this weekend. I'm so thankful my Dad came out to lend a helping hand again. I'm not sure what I would have done without him...well, I would have been bagging plaster every night this week is what would have happened.

I'm really tired, so it's off for a relaxing evening.

It's Official, I'm Clinically Insane

I just the day off of work to tear apart my apartment. I've got to be clinically insane. I've made a way bigger mess then I can handle and now I've got to clean it up. The dust is killing me, much worse then knocking down the kitchen/living room wall, likely due to the bigger space I'm working in. I was able to squeek out cleaning the foyer up tonight, but that was more necessity then anything else as I do need to get out and go to the bathroom.

I'm taking Friday off (not for Good Friday) to continue working and clean things up. On the bright side, my Dad called me today and had a change in plans. He is going to come out tomorrow to help me out with this mess. I didn't know how much time this would take me so I didn't call any of my buddies to ask for help this weekend. I'm sure they are all booked with family plans anyways and this is the nasty part of the renovation process. I want to subject as few people as required to this mess if I want any friends in the future.

All in all, I'm sure this will be worth it in the long run. Cracking plaster, 1/8" of paint, no insulation and water damage were all the reasons for this. I'm not insane to try to make this place loads better...am I???

Busted

Today I was busted by the super of my building. I had this one coming to me, but thought I could defy the laws of grumpy/overprotective new yorkers. Wrong!

I knew I wasn't supposed to knock down the wall without board permission. I also knew I wasn't supposed to do construction on the weekends. It turns out that a lot of dust fell into the steam pipe collar in my kitchen. When the heat kicked on recently, the expansion and contraction of the pipe resulted in dust falling into my neighbor's kitchen. I politely dealt with him about this and offered to seal it for him. I thought this was a normal occurrence in every NYC apartment, so I didn't think much of it.

Apparently, it kept falling for 1 week while I was gone at Greenbuild (kind of ironic how I'm at a conference about building for the future as my old building is falling apart in a sense). My neighbor continuously phoned the managing agent who then told the super to check out my apartment today, the day the electrical work started.

I assured the super that it was fine and that my structural engineer had looked at it, assuring me it wasn't a load bearing wall. He freaked out, telling me the ceiling would fall down on me. It's funny how much these guys don't know and they take care of your building!

Anyways, no consequences yet, but I plan on hearing soon about it.

Debris Removal Hurts...My Wallet!

I had to get rid of all the wall debris today in order for the electrician to have the proper room to work in. The city has been letting me down with the pickup and resulting in nothing but angry phone calls from my super. I decided to pursue removal by paying someone to get it done.

One company came in this morning and wanted $475 to take away all the plaster and wood. I told them to take a hike. After a few searches on Craigslist and phone calls, I found a guy who would take a cargo van full of debris for $300 if I brought it to the curb. I instantly jumped at this option as there was no cheaper way (van rental + gas + finding the dump + paying the dump + my time > $300). This also gave me the opportunity to get rid of all the trim that's been lying around forever.

After an hour of hauling bags down in laundry carts (shhhh!!! don't tell my neighbors!!) with the help of Rachel and Chris, we got everything to the curb. The money exchanged hands and all was done. The best part was that the contractor offered to bring a garbage truck next time if I had more debris! Cool! He can only bring the truck at night though....sound illegal???

Can you taste it?

Dust, dust and more dust. This is what you get for knocking down an old dry plaster wall. Blah!

My floors have a nice coating on them, no matter how much I mop. It's getting better though as I keep cleaning. I think I just need to buy a new mop!

The electrical starts next week and I went to buy supplies the other night. 18 recessed cans at home depot worked out to $275. Not too bad. I got free dimmers from Matt Franks at work, 6 of them which retail @ $50 a piece. Again, connections are great!

I'm looking forward to the lighting being installed, although it will be a bit of musical chairs as I have to clear out the kitchen and living room, and then flip it over the weekend so that the bedroom is clear. I think it will work out in the end.

The Berlin Wall

Today Brian and I took down the wall. Two other friends crapped out on me, but I was asking a lot for people to come over on a Sunday afternoon after all the Halloween parties that were happening on Sunday night.

We had fun knocking it down and it only took us 4.5 hours, start to finish with some relief help from Rachel. The amount of material used in plaster/lath construction is amazing! To top it off, it's really freaking heavy! I hope I can slowly dispose of this using city garbage services, but I already had a problem with the paint peeling process in this area and that was about 1/20th of the amount of waste.

Like the pizza and beer, Brian was fully paid with a diner meal and chocolate milkshake. Savings = $2500 by my best guess. I have a feeling this is going to come back to haunt me someday....

Archaeological Digs....in my apartment

So after a long evening of stripper application, I began peeling late this afternoon to find a surprise. There's a transom window above my bedroom door!

Before peeling:


After peeling:


Yup, didn't have a clue it was painted over! So, then I got a bit curious and decided to figure out why my bathroom tiles were slightly raised over the threshold. Sure enough, they tiled over the old original floor tiles.


Then I ripped out the bathroom door casings to find more old tiles behind the wall tiles.


I doubt that I'll save the bathroom tiles, but the transom window will be a cool original feature to keep around.