Destruction

The opposite of construction, which has been the definition of work at my house over the past few days. Not in a bad way, of course. On the contrary, destruction was necessary to facilitate construction. And that's what I've been doing. On Sunday, after a morning spent watching Rugby at the pint and drinking Guiness, my bro-in law, Scott, and I demolished the oversized, rotten deck attached to my house. When I say rotten, I mean it. Quite a bit of it literally disintegrated under the blows of a sledgehammer. So much so that my back yard is now covered in bits of rotten deck wood. It did, however, make it a lot easier to dismantle, taking us just over two hours instead of the four I figured it would. I took a time-lapse video, once I get it uploaded to YouTube I'll post it.

And as for the inside of the house, demolition revealed this nastiness:

The top picture is mold caused by water leaking in through a crack in the concrete foundation, which will be repaired hopefully in the next two weeks. The latter picture is what we found when the contractor removed the west wall that runs along the back of the two main floor bedrooms. While that wall is bad, and some studs need to be removed, it's actually better than I thought. No floor boards or joists will need to be removed, and the contractor is going to reinforce the wall despite being confident that it's still structurally sound. While the mold in the basement looks bad, removing it won't be difficult or problematic since the entire basement is being gutted anyway.

So progress is being made. The window company will be replacing the windows and cutting larger ones into the basement bedrooms to facilitate a secondary suite, I am supposed to be meeting someone soon to get a quote for granite counter tops, and once the mold is removed I can kick the furnace on and count the days until that ancient tank of a unit is replaced by a newer, high efficiency one!