Get your mind out of the gutter, would you?

While I have no cool photos to post (left the camera at a party this past weekend, but it will be back home soon!), rest assured we spent most of our holiday weekend tackling home improvement projects. In fact, we managed to gut the rest of the stairwell and the upstairs hallway – all 20 or so feet of it, including most of the ceiling. Mess? What mess?

We started out Saturday thinking we’d pull out the dropdown ceilings found in various places upstairs. To throw them out, since we had the dumpster and all. That turned into some cracked plaster removal, which turned into “Let’s go ahead and gut the hallway so we can rewire the upstairs.” It’s amazing how quickly things escalate when we’re feeling energetic.
Removing the walls/ceiling was an involved process….

• Remove the drop-ceiling tiles and framing in 2 bedrooms and one long hallway.
• Remove all bits of loose or crumbling plaster.
• Pull the lathe and remaining plaster off the hallway walls and ceilings with a crowbar.
• Go back in and pull all eight zillion nails that held the lathe on.
• Shovel mounds of demo-mess (plaster, nails, wood, dust) into a garbage can.
• Drag the garbage can (which now weighs about three hundred pounds) down the stairs, out the door, and over to the dumpster.
• Hoist the garbage can up into the air, dump everything in it.
• Repeat the shoveling, dragging, and hoisting about 40 times until all of the debris has been cleared.
• Sweep, and vacuum, and sweep some more. Then vacuum again, because that plaster dust is stubborn stuff. Mop about 5 times. Give up and decide it’s “clean enough”.

It took two days of sweat and frustration. The good news is that we’ve exposed nearly all of the remaining knob and tube lines; this ought to make rewiring much, much easier than we had originally anticipated. Teague got busy the other night and wired up a brand new three-way light for the stairwell, which is AWESOME. Previously, the only light available for the hallway/stairs was a little night-light plugged into an electrical outlet. And since our stairs are a deathtrap full of odd angles and sharp curves, good lighting is key.
It’s a small thing, but I feel very fancy having a three-way light switch in our house; given that most rooms didn’t even have light switches when we moved in, it feels like a huge upgrade!Wondering how three-way switches work? Check out this page:

http://home.howstuffworks.com/three-way2.htm