04.02.12.: Tearing (more) Walls Down

When a girl and her boyfriend call it quits, what is she to do?  Some may go for a massage, perhaps a manicure, or  movie and a pint of ice cream.   This one buys a new power tool and tears a wall down.

After having exposed some of the brick chimneys in the building, I was really itching to do a few more.  They were begging for it really I swear.  It wasn’t part of the contractor’s scope, but he agreed that if I did the work, he’d shovel all the debris out the window and haul it away for me.  If you’ve ever demolished an old plaster wall, you know how huge that is.  That stuff is heavy!  My goal was to get one finished this weekend, and the other next weekend.  With a little help, I got both mostly knocked out!  Check out the progress:

I did the first one myself… it went something like this:
– pack up all necessary tools, schlep them to the 3rd floor of the building
– realize I forgot the demo hammer – steal one of the contractor’s (hi Chad!)
– tear drywall off the stud wall built around the chimney
– realize I have nothing to cut the studs with
– go to Home Depot, purchase Sawzall
– arrive back at the building to realize the cashier didn’t take the anti-theft tag off the tool case
– bound and determined not to go back to Home Depot, take the lock to the basement and bash it with a chisel until it breaks
– open the case and realize that unlike the saw I almost bought, the one I actually bought didn’t come with any blades
– go back to Home Depot, purchase blades – finally saw the 2×4 studs and break them out
– get to business with the rotary hammer and chisel about 2/3 of the way up the chimney
– leave when arm can no longer hold hammer.

That whole process took 2.5 hours on Saturday, about an hour of which I actually spent working.  Heh.  But it was really exciting to see the results come easily (you know, after the Home Depot shenanigans and all) At the first bout of chimney exposing, I figured I was worthless at chiseling, but left to my own devices I totally figured it out.  While I don’t have the arm strength to push hard enough into the wall for the chisel to work, I can leverage my weight into the thing and melt that stuff away.  Note:  This leverage thing gets very interesting when working on a ladder.

 
On Sunday it was my plan to finish this chimney out, clean up, and be done until next week.  Well, I suppose that badassery is genetic because my brother came out to play for a while and knocked out the entire other chimney in an afternoon.  This is after we figured out (the hard way) that two people working on one chimney at the same time:  one chiseling, one wire brushing, is really, really painful.  As in flying bits of plaster shrapnel in the face painful.  So, he retreated to chimney #2.  See below:

I stayed upstairs and worked on chiseling the remaining brick then cleaning it with a cupped wire brush attachment on an angle grinder.  The top part of the chimney took way longer, seeing as how I had to position the ladder just right in order to get the right leverage on the chisel.    Overall, it was a relatively easy job.  Having help definitely made things go faster, as well as our cool-as-hell-contractor who (I hope) didn’t mind cleaning up after us.  I don’t think my arms could have handled hauling all that plaster downstairs.  Now all that’s left to do is finish the wire brushing and fine finish work!