On The First Day Of Demo...

...My true love cleaned the refrigerator. We had to take everything out of it to move it anyway, so he figured why not? That was at the start of the day. To fit the fridge parts into the basement scrub sink, Chris took the washer drain hose out during the chore. At the end of the day, he ran a load of wash which (hose is out, remember?) flooded the basement. So, we got in a little wee-hours wet-vaccing. At least we figured out the problem before calling the contractor in a panic. (Water! Everywhere! Help!) The thing is? Our GC rocks - he totally would have come over - so I'm glad we figured out we were dopes on our own. The clean fridge is now installed (loose interpretation of installed, here) in the dining room, completing our temporary kitchen setup. The enormous table I bought last year is really handy for storage underneath and lots of temporary counter space.

In an hour and forty-five minutes, the guys had deconstructed everything but the floor. Getting the floor up took most of the afternoon but the guys left the site at the end of the day with demolition complete. After they'd gone, I went down to the basement and took pictures looking up through the kitchen. Hi, Second Floor! They got the subfloor laid - LEVEL! - today. We tossed marbles on it and watched with glee as they stopped in the middle of the room, short distances from where they'd initially landed.

We've discovered a few interesting tidbits about the house. The wall between our kitchen and dining room was an outside wall - there were siding planks hiding out behind the drywall. An old door was also uncovered across the room. There are not as many unsavory discoveries as we were expecting, and the ones that are turning up (like the wall supports that aren't actually long enough to reach the header) will be fixed.

Pictures from the first two days of construction are up at Flickr.

Stay tuned...