Don’t Mess Around With the Demolition Man
When we moved into our house last year, I noticed that the walls on the third floor had an odd texture to them, and that they had very noticeable vertical lines (but not quite the kind of lines that I’ve seen before on bad drywall taping jobs). My guess was that the previous owners had painted over wallpaper. I didn’t mind if the walls weren’t perfect, so I wasn’t too worried about it. (I should point out that the third floor is not original to the house - the first two floors have nice plaster walls).
Lats month, I started on a new project: I was going to run new electrical lines on the 3rd floor, and paint. Not only are the existing electrical lines old, but when the third floor was added, they just ran the new electrical lines off the existing second floor lines. That means we’ve got 5 rooms all on one circuit, which is asking for trouble. My plan was to pop off the baseboards and run the new lines behind them, so I wouldn’t have to make too many holes in the walls.
When I removed the baseboards, I could see what the walls were made of, and I learned why they looked the way they did. They weren’t made out of drywall or plaster - they were made out of particle board (a type of board that essentially consists of glued together sawdust). And those funny lines? They sealed the gaps between the boards with….duct tape. Whoever did this work was a fool. Building the interior walls out of wood is a huge fire hazard. You could put a match to them and then watch the house burn down mighty fast.
So all the walls on the 3rd floor have to come down, including in the stairwell. As you can see in the picture, the demolition is underway. I’ve discovered that it’s a lot harder to tear out particle board then drywall. If you try to cut it with any kind of motorized saw, it kicks up a huge amount of dust - even worse than drywall. If you try to pry it off the studs with a crowbar, you end up just tearing out a tiny piece where your crowbar is. After some trial-and-error I came up with a reasonably good technique - I pry the board free all along one stud, and then get my hands behind it and slowly work it back and forth. That loosens up the nails and I can pull the board apart in fairly big chunks. In some spots they went crazy with a nail gun though - putting nails every couple of inches - so some of it is slow going.
Putting up new drywall for the entire 3rd floor is too big of a job for just me. Once I’ve got the demolition done and the new electrical lines in, we’ll dip into our line of credit on the house to hire someone to install new drywall. We had other plans for that money, but something as hazardous as this has to come first.
It’s always an adventure.
