Now that we’ve shown off how the house looked it was time to rip it apart. None of us had any experience with this sort of thing before so, without much fanfare, I took a hammer to one of the interior walls to see what was what.
The walls were a plaster and lath system. The wall or ceiling finishing process begins with wood laths. These are narrow strips of wood, or split boards, are nailed horizontally across the wall studs or ceiling joists. Each wall frame is covered in lath, tacked at the studs. The lath is typically about one inch wide by four feet long by 1⁄4 inch (6.4 mm) thick. Each horizontal course of lath is spaced about 3⁄8 inch (9.5 mm) away from its neighboring courses.
Interesting, no? Anyway, back to hitting it with things:
Once the exterior wall came down we saw that the lath was nailed to these huge boards. Did the original builders want to give it some sort of log cabin look? Who knows.
Back to business:
Hmm… this is starting to get a little out of hand.
Okay, a lot of out of hand.
My father-in-law (below) said he’d clean the room while I was at work.
And it came out great!
But perhaps I should have gone over specifics with him.
It didn’t look much better the next morning either.
So armed with some contractor bags I set about cleaning it up. 57 bags later…
I had an idea that should have been obvious from the start:
Some panoramas of the whole affair:
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