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Phases - Demolition

dem·o·li·tion
noun
1. The act or process of wrecking or destroying, especially destruction by explosives.

OK, there were no explosives involved. . . but there might as well have been. Demo was (and still is) an incredible process of unexpected destructive magnitude. The initial days of demo seemed to us like we were doing something horribly wrong. And it kept on getting worse. As we walked through the remains of what our supervising contractor called "the most beautiful house I have every had to destroy, we kept saying, "Can't we save this?" to which Jim would reply "We can try, but it will probably be gone sooner or later. He was right. We are STILL removing significant numbers of roof rafters, studs and plaster. It seems that our framer's favorite sentence is "I think we'll just pull this out and redo it.

A number of things that we thought would be salvageable just weren't after being removed, recessed light fixtures and loads of electrical stuff, but we were able to safely remove a number of items like doors windows and light fixtures and sold a large quantity on Craigslist.com - Love that internet!

Looking at the drawings it appeared that the ground floor would remain largely untouched. A word to those considering a 2nd floor addition: "largely untouched" means largely removed, largely destroyed or largely damaged but certainly not "largely untouched." Now, to be fair, everything that has been removed will come back better than before and in many cases it is less expensive to redo than to try to match-n-patch later. The end result will be superior, but the process is not just a little disturbing.

Our demo contractor, Gus Franco, is awesome. He is a cool guy and easy to work with. His prices are reasonable and his guys work HARD. He was always able to accommodate our ongoing demo schedule!

Following, some highlight pictures | Next Phase: The Shed