There has been a lot of “pondering” over this job. First we talked about it and thought it might not be a good idea as it was a an outside wall of the house, and it would take wall space away from a room of basically windows. Several of our friends were all for the idea when we explained to them what we were thinking about. Really all I wanted was just to take the chimney down so the room would be bigger.
Well…we did it, we actually did it!! Terribly scary too! The wall between the kitchen and living room is gone. Tiff’s boyfriend, Dallas, came over to help bust out the wall and I took the day off work and hauled out the cinder blocks they knocked out.
John first used his Hilti to drill holes in the perimeter of what we wanted to remove. He even had me drill a few holes. I was a bit skeptical at first that I wouldn’t be able to do it, but it was amazingly easy. The drill wasn’t that heavy and I hardly had to push on the drill for it to dig in and go through the wall. He was so proud of me, he took a picture.
The next thing he and Dallas did was jack up and support the ceiling. That was a critical part because if they didn’t get this right…well the whole house could come down. Once that was secured they started busting out the wall. They started breaking the blocks VERY gently at the top where the cement header was going to eventually go. They had to be careful not to punch out to much, and they wanted to make sure the jacks would not give way.
After the header area was out, things went more quickly and the blocks and wall came tumbling down. John got a little exuberant and almost took out a window. If I hadn’t opened it all the way, the rock would have gone right through it, ha ha! It was exciting to see how much the room opened up as the wall was removed. Several hours later the wall was down and the debris removed to the trailer outside. John will be taking the cinder to a place right up the road that is looking for clean fill. He said I shouldn’t worry to much about how low the tires were riding under the weight….OK….
We ordered pizza for lunch because we were just too dirty to go out or to make something for ourselves. John was also in the middle of pouring concrete across the threshold of the new opening so that it was square and flush with the kitchen floor. We will need it to be ready when we put the kitchen floor down.
Bath time was finally in order. John had run out of concrete mix and he needed some trowels, so it was off to Lowes but we were so dirty we wanted to wash up first. Because the cinder blocks on the outside edges of the new opening would be supporting the entire upstairs once the headers are in place he wanted to poured concrete down through the block holes. He wants to make sure that we have plenty of support in place.
Finally we were done, time to clean up. I spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening cleaning the cinder dust off of EVERYTHING!!! We covered stuff with plastic but it didn’t really matter. John did help clean the kitchen area though. Tomorrow he will set the header, either his friend Roger will be up to help or Dallas. Hope that all goes well, I’ll be at work. The headers look very, very heavy.
