What a [Terrifying] Difference A Day Makes

So, The Thing.  We removed it this afternoon.  It was a long process--  while this house has many quirks (and we found quite a few of them inside the ceiling today) one thing is for certain: it was built to last.  The Thing fought us hard.

At first, it was all fun and games.  Yay demolition!  Doing something like this is kind of like popping a gross zit.  It's really disgusting but still somehow satisfying.  Too much information?  Sorry.  Here's a picture that isn't of Ray popping a gross zit:

You know what else is kind of like a gross zit?  The blue plastic faux marble shower surround.  I can't wait to pull that off the wall and confront the moldy horror that surely lies behind it.  Summer 2013 here we come.

Anyhow, good thing we taped a drop cloth over the bathtub to protect the plumbing, because there was A LOT of crap in the ceiling.  And by crap, I mean there was literally crap in the ceiling.  Showers of old fossilized rodent feces fell down upon us as we disassembled The Thing's frame and detached its top plate from the ceiling.  Here's Ray in a death match with the top plate:

See all that wire armature hanging down?  Well, as we discovered, this is because underneath the drywall ceiling is the original plaster ceiling, armature and all.  And in some places there's some weird 1/2in. thick paperboard.  The more we ripped away, the more we realized that this wasn't going to be a quick cut-drywall-to-fit-and-screw-it-into-the-nice-level-ceiling type of job.  

And we weren't wrong: we wound up having a LOT of drywalling issues.  We had to shim the the gap in a bunch of places to make it level and the right depth for drywall; in other places the weird paperboard was jutting out into the gap and we didn't want to cut it since we have no idea what it's doing there (probably holding up the roof-- who knows?), so we sort of had to drywall around it.  The wire armature, which we cut back as much as possible without damaging the rest of the ceiling, stubbornly refused to get out of the way in several spots.  And since the width of the gap was wildly inconsistent and there were tons of obstructions in it, we basically had to use 37 small pieces of drywall to even remotely patch the thing.  And when we ran out of shims before getting to the last side piece, we realized we were just going to have to clean up and call it a night.

And boy is it going to be really fun to tape and mud our new irregularly shaped, seam-tastic drywall to the wavy, uneven, water-damaged ceiling.  

All this leads to a sort of sad finish: I can't even show you a close-up because it's too awful-looking right now.  But the photo below shows the unfinished side-- off to the hardware store in the morning for more shims and some metal corners:

 

And when we're all done affixing the last piece and taping and mudding and spraying the whole patch with orange-peel texture so it'll blend into the rest of the ceiling, I'm going to paint the whole room a nice soft blue with lots of gray in it.  And then I'm going to drink a whole bottle of gin.  And when I sober up we'll tackle the floor, and the tile, and the light fixtures, and kfnxbfjabfjgfhdbjx we will never ever finish all of this. 

PS: The plumbing problem in the kitchen is fixed-- thanks for asking!  It was a broken pipe behind the sink.  Repaired in one hour to the tune of $275.  Meh.  Cheaper than we thought.

PPS: Our work today was interrupted by a run-in with-- no joke-- a rabid squirrel.  Some friends had stopped by to see the progress we'd made on the house, and we were standing on the back porch surveying the changes in the yard when a tiny stumbling ninja-squirrel jumped on the porch and started charging towards us.  It literally lunged at our friend.  We chased it away with a rake and ran inside.  The four of us stood in the dining room and watched out the French doors as it tried to climb a few trees and crashed to the ground each time.  We called the cops (no animal control out here on weekends) and they came out, but by then the little would-be assassin was gone.  Turns out that a kid was bitten by a squirrel on the other side of town yesterday, so we're supposed to be on the lookout for it...