Termite Damage

There are a variety of reasons why we decided to tear out all the walls and take most of the house down to studs. One of those very important reasons was so we could see and evaluate the condition of the house's bones. While everything looked to be on the up and up, you just never know about what is hiding behind the walls.

An inspection of the house revealed old termite damage and neither of us were really surprised to hear that. It's an old house, and old wood is very tasty to munching bugs. Thankfully there is currently no active damage and the damage isn't too extensive.

One of the first rooms to get the walls torn off was the future dining room. And. Well. It wasn't pretty. I'm telling you right now that this room has it firmly in its mind to be the problem child of the whole stinking house. Not only did I throw up (in my mouth) the first day that I worked on the room, but also its the only room (so far) that has presented us with any amount of termite damage on the beams.

The subtle blue arrows point to the damage.

Its pretty funny to see how only one or a few certain beams can get affected. Why only that one piece of wood? A lot of the damage in this room is very centralized in certain spots. Which makes it easier to fix. So, overall this damage isn't much of a surprise or a problem.

If we made the decision to not tear out the walls would I be worried? No. Not really. I'm of the school of thought that if an old home is still standing strong today, then its going to keep standing strong for a looonnnggg time. Despite the damage you would not believe how solid the room is still. Pretty crazy how they used to build houses back in the day.

Termite damage is fug.

Fubar takes on Plaster, and Wins!

Before the Wee house I'd never taken down a wall. Sure I've knocked into and dented more than my fair share of walls before, but I'd never intentionally pulled one completely down. Now that the living room areas were almost completely stripped of their paneling it became time to take the walls out.


At first I was staunchly against taking down our plaster walls, but Pete talked me round to accepting it and now I can say I'm behind the decision to rip them out. This isn't going to be a historically accurate remodel because our house doesn't call for one. Our renovation goal is to take an neglected house and make it a livable home while highlighting any historical charm available. Cracking plaster walls are most certainly not charming.


Enter the Stanley FuBar and a quick lesson on how to use it.
Aim- swing-land on wall. Crack plaster. Pry off lath. Repeat.

I have to say, the FuBar is FUN! And with a weight of 4+lbs I got quite the upper body workout in as I took out the diving walls between the two living rooms and exposed the original exterior wall. All while creating a glorious fantastic construction mess.

Picture of the original exterior wall of the house... hence the window... With the non structural dividing wall mostly down...

Pardon the blurry pictures, my hands were shot for the day. I'd developed a nice healthy set of thumb blisters from the way too large work gloves that I was wearing while swinging the fubar. Ouch.

Down go the Cinder blocks!

The view of the shed after an afternoon of clearing the last bits of the roof/wood/plastic from the structure. I liked how it looked like this, reminded me of old ruins we saw all over Ireland. If old Gaelic structures had orange Home Depot ladders in them. And if they were located in New Jersey.

Once the shed was just a shell I let my imagination run a little wild and started envisioning 1,237 various ways to fix it up. But none of those imagined designs were a garage, which is what we need most of all. More than an outdoor dining room with terrace or giant doll house that is for sure, which were my two favorite imaginative designs.

I went inside the Wee house to play with Mr.Smashy and the Husband got busy with taking the walls down. An hour or two passes and I went outside to check on him, being safety conscious I was just making sure he wasn't involved in some sort of freak tumbling wall accident. Husband was fine and in the middle of pushing down a stubborn cinder block wall, I joined in on the fun and soon enough the wall was down!

Cinder block walls are surprisingly easy to push down when rebar isn't used. Note to everyone- use rebar and fill the holes with cement if you don't want some 5'6" Jersey Girl to have the ability to demolish any cinder block structures you build.

Ze' Rubble. I lost a Hydrangea bush in the process. Which made give Pete the evil eye, I'll try to dig up the root system this fall, it might still be salvageable.

After a day of the Husband swinging the sledgehammer and him ( I helped!) pushing walls over. Can't believe that everything is down! Now comes the hard part of disposing all the broken bits. We've contacted a cement recycling facility and they'll take the cinder block for FREE!! Just have to figure out if trailering loads over or renting a dumpster is best.

Getting down with Mr.Smashy!

While Pete was outside demolishing the shed I decided to get busy with tearing apart the inside of the house. I grabbed Mr.Smashy, my trusty rusty crowbar, and headed into the living room areas. Plan of attack- get paneling off the walls. Our living room(s) are separated by a partial wall and large opening.

Trim was the first thing I pulled off in the room. Most of it was in the extremely cheap variety, as in plastic and some sort of odd wood Styrofoam hybrid, so no love was lost as I yanked away. Some of the window trim was installed on top of the paneling, which meant in order to get the paneling off I had to pry away. Thankfully finish nails were the only things used to hold anything down and they make for easy removal.

Next came time to work on the paneling themselves. In theory they should be extremely easy to remove, couple nails pop out and you just have to wrestle the unruly sheet down. Theories are for the birds folks. Most of the room had two layers of paneling- Dark Wood and Light Wood! Which is automatically double the work. There was heating duct work , DIY walls and double layers of paneling blocking my every move. Adding to the complication was the fact they used paneling nails, which have lovely rings that make the nail extremely hard to get out.

Taking down the paneling included not only pulling but kicking, jumping and cursing until a I managed to get a piece down. Every time I would get in a rhythm with taking down the panels I would run across a new challenge... or new disappointment. Like when I took down the chimney paneling (flowers!) and saw nothing but plaster and wallpaper behind it. Sigh, I was so hoping for an amazing fireplace with bricks and maybe an inlaid tile pattern. I'm in for a lot of careful chipping if I want to see those bricks!

The front wall was by far the most surprising in that we discovered a hidden doorway behind the paneling! It must have led in from the original foyer. We had no idea that there was anything behind that paneling besides plaster. An window frame was also uncovered , but we knew that was there, since you can see if from the other side of the wall.

Quick notes about this photo-

#1 is pointing out out the BLUE wood paneling that the hallway had.

#2 Shows where our original wood trim used to be! The moulding that was taken off so the paneling could lay flat. The same trim that was pulled off, cut up and used to hang the drop ceiling.

The view from our newly discovered door looking into the room at the end of the work day.
and a tiny blurry Nala puppy looking over my hard work.

Mr.Smashy and I would have high fived at this point. But he doesn't have hands, so I went outside and chilled in the shade with some water instead. The other side of the living room can wait a bit!

The State of the Shed

This weekend we have two completely uninterrupted days to work on the house, and I'm really jazzed about it! You know you have serious house fever when all you want to do is sweat your buns off working in a stinky old house.

Pete ended the weekend last Sunday by loading up the trailer with more of the shed remains and old roof. Now we're able to start the Saturday work day by heading right over to the dump, what a stinky way to start the weekend! Lately my sense of smell is crazy strong and I gag if we get stuck by a particularly ripe spot. Hopefully our straight to the dump strategy will leave us enough time in the work day to load up another trailer and drive back over there for a repeat. The dump is only open on Wed and Sat from 8-3. Since we both work full time, Saturday really is our only available day to get there.

Why not get a dumpster you ask? Cause all this does seem like an awful lot of trouble to go through for disposing the demolition materials... Easy answer. Money!
Dumpsters are quite costly and given the nature of our materials, they would fill up fast! We've come close to filling the dumps dumpsters with a trailer load before, and for only $60 that is a lot easier of a price to swallow than the $300+ it would cost for a 30 yard dumpster in the driveway. One dumpster would not even come close to making a dent in everything we need to do.

The load above held most of the living room panels and all the plastic/wood rigged greenhouse side of the shed. The canvas tarp gets put on top to help with keeping debris from flying out. This trailer load hit over a ton at the dump.

All the demolition stuff is coming along slowly but surely... but there is still so much to clean up!

Inside the main part of the shed. Notice the beam sticking out by the other door? I walked into that last weekend. Gave me a nice little bump on the noggin. Being careful is something I really have to work on.

Deconstruction (and Ants)

Permit for destruction in hand Pete set out to destroy the backyard shed thing. The main part of the structure is cinder block but there is also an addition of a wood lean-to. While we ponder the best/fastest way to get rid of the cinder block, the lean-to can get torn the flip down by using our own sheer muscle.


The scene that greeted up as we pulled into the driveway. I've cropped just the lean-to addition into the picture, so you can see how flimsy it looks. But them look closer to the larger area highlighted by the pink circle. You'll see a giant tree limb that Pete purposely landed right on top of the roof, hoping that it would cause the roof to weaken and maybe even collapse. No such luck. The roof held as the limb fell and I could swear it even yawned when everything can crashing down. As if to say "Is that the best you can do?"

The other pink highlighted circle is our neighbors wood chipper. They dropped it off in case we wanted to use it! How nice is that? They've even been chipping up the smaller branches during their down time during the week.

While Pete started with the tree removal and lean-to destruction I got busy with some ick removal on the inside of the house. I'm planning on doing a complete "Before" tour of the Wee house sometime soon, but until then you'll have to bear with just snippets of the entire house.

Here is what was once the laundry room ( see if you can find the bleach stain) and our eventual planned dining room. We had some of our overflow construction essentials in the room. I started with bringing all the tools/extra supplies into the bathroom that is just out of the frame on the left. Bigger items got pushed up against the wall.

Once empty(ish) I started with the removal of all curtains, mini-blinds and window covering plastic. I really wanted to open the windows and get some air flow circulating inside the house, but alas, all the windows are nailed shut. At least sunlight is an improvement.

Then I busted out the utility knife and started attacking the carpet in a neat orderly manner. Hacking up carpets is hard work! The plastic backing carpets have is surprisingly tough. It took at least three cuts for me to get through the plush shag and cut all the way through.

I was at the last two feet of carpet rolling up when I realized that there was poop. sitting. on the carpet. an old big poop. I might have started gagging. ( actually I'm gagging just thinking about it now) and I might have gagged so much that I eventually threw up in my mouth.

I unfortunately now have literal first hand experience with the very popular phrase "I just threw up in my mouth a little" Except it wasn't a little and I had to run outside to heave some more. Friggen dis.gusting.

After Gatorade and some bad jokes about how I just don't have the stomach for house renovations, I grabbed a mask and headed back in to de-poop the house. Blech. Finish rolling up the carpet and start on the wood paneling.


After removing as much of the paneling as possible without a sawsall (which was being used on the outside destruction project) I glanced upwards and decided that the ceiling was ready to come down. Since I'm accident prone I decided that it would be prudent to utilize my hard hat for this part.



The whole thing came down with one massive pull. You like the one teeny tiny bit of insulation that was placed above the ceiling? One would think that in a house full of plastic lining, drop ceilings and nailed shut windows all in the name of preventing heat loss that they would have sprung for an entire roll of insulation... but no. It's less for me to destroy and clean up though, so I'm fine with it.

After the ceiling was pulled down I went outside to see how far Pete had gotten on the shed deconstruction. Now the lean-to certainly looks like a fun clean up. I can see me throwing it away at the dump already.


While cleaning up I dunked my hand far into the chip bag, popped one in my mouth and then looked inside to see how many were left. And I saw this instead. An entire colony of ants swarming about, ecstatic to have found such a mother load of food. You better believe I spat my chip out with the quickness.
yum.