Plaster and lathing begone!

 

This attractive photo is one wall of what I spent this morning demolishing as we move forward in the renovation of the downstairs bathroom.  The green stuff is horsehair plaster.   The horizontal boards just below it are the lathing.  I am removing the plaster and lathing, because as you see in the picture. . . there is NO insulation.  Not a speck and that is not because I removed it. It is because it simply does not exist.  By the way, this bathroom is on the north side of the house in a New England state.  Yup, it has always been a very cold room.  The hardest thing I do every morning is get dressed in it at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. in this freeze box.  room.  I had to do all of these two walls with extreme caution as what you can't see in the picture is that the toilet is on that wall.  My goal is to keep the room functional (albeit increasingly um, rustic looking?) for as long as possible.  So removing the lathing and plaster is more tedious because I have to be careful that things don't crash down and break the toilet or something awful like that.

I also took down the plaster and lathing in the closet next to the toilet.  That is the area with the weird faux pine boards that conceal--you guessed it--more horsehair plaster and lathing.  I took all the shelves out so that I could get this down to studs.  Except for a tiny section that I will be able to reach if I climb on the laundry stack this entire wall is done.  I didn't perch there today as it was also laundry day and the machines were in use. The idea of sitting up there while they rumbled beneath me was not something I wanted to pursue.

Essentially all the destruction happened between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.  Then from then on I had to get all the debris out of the room and stored outside.  I will call a removal company next week and see how many millions of dollars they charge to cart it away.  Normally I would bring in a dumpster but it is winter.  We have 3 cars and one shortish driveway.  If it snows I can not park on the street due to a parking ban and a Nor-easter is expected next week.  So I am instead calling one of those companies that tells you to snap your fingers and your mess is gone.  We shall see.

Going down to stud also exposed some brick on our chimney that runs through this room which need repair. I will explore that tomorrow.  For now the room is clean and  usable.  I put a temporary shelf in the closet so that we can store beauty supplies there for now. 

And we have more to learn about.  My wife cleans for a family a few towns away. The woman also did a bathroom renovation, largely on her own.  Truthfully I think it was her efforts that inspired K to go all in on this project as she is often somewhat more tentative than I am about this type of thing.  S told her that if we were taking the room to studs that we should consider installing a small mat of radiant heating (by say the shower and toilet area) to just warm the floor.  So now I need to youtube and learn about this.  I have learned so far that it is not cost prohibitive either to install or to run. Those are plusses. I have yet to watch the whole video though so I am not sure how complicated such a process would be.  Stay tuned!