Though we feel like we didn't accomplish anything yesterday, we got the whole upstairs gutted. The photo below shows the view from the window at the front of the house. The sunny patch at the lower left is the stairway opening. We took out the second floor because the homasote ceiling height was at 6'7" and I just barely made it around the rooms. When we first bought the place, I was upstairs and turned around suddenly, breaking a light bulb with my head and tearing out the fixture....yeah, it was time to take out that ceiling. So, we had to take out the walls and will reuse the boards elsewhere in the house. After insulating, we will take the new walls all the way to the peak of the roof so that the two rooms upstairs will have 20 foot ceilings in places. Two new peak windows will really help with the light upstairs as well.

A good pic showing the bathroom while I was removing the fixtures. We will save the cast iron bathtub, which is in fantastic condition. Note how wet the under flooring is. We have leaks from all the old windows upstairs. Meeting tomorrow with a contractor friend who will help us with that.

And, the final shot of the bathroom totally deconstructed. We want to make the bath a bit bigger, perhaps by a foot or so in width..I think it will make all the difference.


Hauling away the second floor in the man-truck.....whew...what a day that was....This took us about six hours total. Greg started at 6 and left at 8:30, then back at 11 for another hour and I worked from 7:30 to 11 and then made the dump run. We were both whipped...shows what a 43 year old man cannot do anymore!!