So we got our asbestos results via email today, and I couldn't believe my eyes when we were given the all-clear to rip those ceiling tiles out with abandon. I blinked, like, thirty-seven times in disbelief. I may or may not have gotten a little teary. This is pretty much the first bone our house has thrown us, and I'd like to think of it as our place's First-Anniversary-Thanks-For-Renovatin'-Me gift to us.
As we were sitting here on the sofa after dinner, reveling in the good no-asbestos news, we started to wonder what we were going to find inside the ceiling. I'd watched this video and I was pretty terrified that the same fate was about to befall us. So we decided we'd just do a little exploratory demo, just to see what we were up against. Demolition masks and safety goggles firmly in place, we picked a random tile and yanked it down. There was a brief rain of fossilized rat shit, and then... nothing. Encouraged, we pulled down a few more tiles. This is what we saw:
Yup! The insulation is contained in weird cardboard baggie-things and appears to be in good shape! Now, I know it's full of sixty-odd years or rodent refuse, and I also know that isn't good, but hey-- it's not going to fall down on us and leave as standing in a waist-deep mixture of dusty blown-in insulation and rat turds, so I'm counting this as a huge positive. See the furring strips that are running vertically in this photo? We'll be able to pull them down and gain nearly an inch of ceiling height, and the attic joists appear to be in really good shape so we should be able to screw the drywall right into them. Like a boss.
After that success, I decided to grab ye olde hammer and chisel and see if I could possibly pry up the big brick pad where the bright red chimenea once sat.
Aside: I took a quick antiquing trip to Portland with my girls M, K, and L a couple of months ago, and we were admiring all the midcentury fabulousness in Sorel's, and that's where I saw the EXACT RED CHIMENEA (I mean literally, I think it was the actual same chimenea) we ripped out of our house... selling for $700. Damn. That would've paid for a lot of drywall. I wish I'd known that stylish Sorel's-type people liked red chimeneas. Oh well.
Anyway, I'd been nervous about this part because it kind of looked like were were going to have to rent a jackhammer to pry up all the mortar. Silly me-- a hammer and chisel should take care of this, mortar and all, in no time flat. Here's what I was able to pry up in two minutes:
Sorry, it's kind of dark in there as the only light comes from overhead.
The pressboard tile (you're seeing it in the bottom left corner of the photo above) is no longer glued down, so that shouldn't be much of a challenge; the carpet you see on the bottom right is attached directly to the pressboard, so we should be able to make short work of it.
Then, since we're completely insane, we decided to pry out just one piece of the wood paneling. That put up a bit more of a fight since we didn't want to remove the "baseboards" (which are actually just stained-to-match 2x4's), but we were able to pry it far enough away from the wall to see that nothing terrifying is happening in there. Nothing is happening in there at all. There's some insulation in the top half (?) of the wall, but I was expecting mountains of rat shit / dead animal carcasses / live animals / chewed wiring / Pennywise the Clown / the little girl from The Ring / a black hole. So I'm going to count that as another win.
So, new plan: Ray and I are going to handle the demo and then use my parents' expertise to get the place put back together again. Maybe they can help us out in the laundry room, where there are some weird-looking structural things going on. SO MANY IDEAS.
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