So many failed nails, the heads have just been hammered down. And so some sucker comes along to pull them all out :(
The plaster in the kitchen was removed and down fell all these apricot stones. Apparently rats like to steal them, carry them into the walls, crack them open and feast on the goo inside. They must have been well fed rats:
Three bedrooms, looking towards the front door:
Front bedroom with the floor removed. The room had a fireplace once:
The Masters arrived early on Saturday morning ready to push the house and its young owners to the limits.
(More poorly-shot footage emerged of the old house, at least it was at the right angle this time. A close study suggests this was taken before more work began Saturday morning.)
The old house remained in its induced coma, and a good thing for it. By the end of Saturday it was all ribs, not a lather existed in the mid-part. Lathers continue to line the exterior walls, some will be removed when the insulation is put it but they will remain for the most part.
The two end rooms, the living room and kitchen/dining, were not lined with lathers. Also, the studs and floors are a different material to the front three rooms. It is likely that the original house was just the front three, with the back 2 added later.
Times were very different in the late-19th century.
A floorboard specialist inspected the boards Saturday morning to see whether they were in good condition to be recycled and live on. The floor is a little close to the ground and there was evidence of borers, so the boards did not meet the specialists approval.
The boards would be lifted non-carefully, care-free even, and discarded.
Sunday required another visit to the tip to offload a truck and a trailers worth of trash. I remain fascinated with the truck and took the video of it offloading the plaster:
The floor in all the rooms was fully lifted by lunch - they did not a chance as I wielded my Mighty Pick-Axe (+1 damage to floorboard).
The afternoon passed, and so too the passageway boards and all the nails.
Sunday night the house was a skeleton, an empty fossil, a pile o' bones.
The house is reduced to its fundamentals, if much more were removed it would be difficult to call it a house. Maybe we cannot call it that now, if a house is four walls, a floor and a ceiling. The Old House lacks a floor.
But there is still one more activity to go before life can be restored, the replacement of its stumps. Starting next Monday the old wooden stumps will be replaced with modern concrete ones.
Newspaper from 1959 makes amazing insulation... derp. One ad in the paper showed 1959 Brownlow medal winner Bob Skilton flogging milk. Australian Women's Weekly put women clearly in their place. Great stuff. Of course it just made us think of Homer (doesn't everything?):
Hey, Deng Xiaoping died (The Simpsons, S9E23)
Who's the handsome man with the hammer?
Here he is again, he looks like my sort of man: rough, ready and dirty.
Internal windows are in aren't they?
More lathers.
Tip-trucks are so cool. I had a Tonka as a kid, still cool as an adult.
More open planned that we intended for this part of the house, but we are trusting our Masters
The old house was placed under a general anesthetic Saturday morning in preparation for some major work. The old thing did not put up much of a fight and by the time the countdown reached 97 it was well and truly out for the count.
The surgery started with a large hole being cut in the rear fence to allow trailers and bob-cats ready access (I presume this is some form of kitty with manly aspirations). The hole created was covered up with temporary fencing. Like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.
And then the major work began: de-plastering.
The Old House was put up to last using the old style of lath and plaster. A pox on whoever it was who thought it would be a good idea. Not only does the plaster have to come down but every single goddam one of the lathers has to come down too. And every nail. Even the nails that the apprentice banged in wonky. Even the nails that lost their heads. A POX!
I'd also like to find who thought it would be cool to cover the front room with newspapers and Woman's Weekly's from 1959 over the baltic timber boards before laying down some green lino. If there is still some pox left, a pox on you too. Not because it is time-consuming to remove or anything, but for crimes against aesthetics. What were you thinking you tight-ass bastard? Although it made for some interesting reading.
Over the two days the front three rooms were all de-plastered and about a third of the passage. The kindly Masters of the [Building] Universe stayed on an extra day to finish the passage, destroy the kitchen and remove all the waste from Sunday-Monday. An early trip was made to a local tip Sunday morning to dispose of Saturday's waste.
On Monday the exhausted owners returned to their day jobs for some respite and healing.
More work will continue next weekend as the remaining rooms are de-plastered and de-lathed.
The young couple and their family embarked on a journey of change with their old house.
The young couples family are Masters of the [Building] Universe (TM). They will be 'assisting' the couple [doing the work].
To start the day there was the presentation ceremony, the Master's presented the couple with Greaves of Protection (+1 against spiders). The couple had never worn protective hand coverings before, it was a great day.
And then before the couple could retire the Masters began working and dragged the couple into a new world of physical labour, the likes of which they want never to see again (but will be enduring a lot of over the coming months).
First things first, removal of floor coverings. The loosely laid carpet, lino, newspaper and other crud was ripped up and thrown aside. The house started the breathe again.
The Master's will be returning next weekend. We will be parading around the house walls singing and blowing our trumpets and the plaster on the walls will just fall off - if I understand the technical plan correctly.
Either that or we will be beating the crap out of the walls with hammers, mallets, foul language (that's from Mrs Young Couple), pitiful pleadings (Mr Young Couple) and maybe, just maybe, power tools.
The following footage has surfaced, showing a poorly shot walkthrough of the Old House.
The footage was taken just after the floor coverings were removed leaving behind the aged baltic floorboards. If you look at the floor in the first room you can see the old lino, green, stained and poorly laid. This is the last of the coverings, it was left as we had already started filling the room with all sorts of special tools and items, the names of which exist only in some arcane lore.
This house, which is currently in need of a good name, lived a good life in a good suburb.
The house saw families grow and die.
It watched the suburb change around it.
It watched a raliway line be laid and then removed.
It watched two World Wars.
It watched Prime Ministers and Premiers come and go.
It watched organised and disorganised crime.
It watched its friends be torn down, and young upstart apartment buildings go up in their place.
The house grew old, it grew tired. It wondered whether it would soon make way for young apartments.
The house was not ready to die, it wanted to live.
It reached through space and time and found what it needed. It found a young couple who wanted a well-aged house. A couple that did not want to live with a punk-apartment.
The old house and the young couple reached an agreement, they would renew the house, restore its glory and make it the envy of all the apartments and other elderly houses on the street. In return, the young couple would be warm, cosy, happy and have a place for their kittehs.
This is the story of that house and that young couple.
