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A rare 2-week trip to work on the house – Day 2

Let’s start this post with a weather update. It is Thursday April 11, 2019 and the State of Minnesota is under a severe winter weather advisory. Basically, it is blizzard time. Local schools were closed for the day, Mass at the local church was canceled. Roads were very quiet. So what do us two Californians do? We get into our car and start working in an unheated house.

The plan for the day was to gut the room we started on yesterday. The work consisted of:

  • Taking down the lath and plaster ceiling and walls
  • Removing the separating wall in the middle of the room
  • Remove all debris
  • Salvage all of the oak studs and possibly the trim of the windows
Yesterday we removed the lath and plaster from the separating wall.
Now that wall is gone. Between these two door openings used to be a wall.
Clean walls and ceiling.
A view towards the utility room. You can also see the salvaged oak studs.
This is the center of the old ceiling structure. It is out intent to remove this in favor of exposing just the cross beams and giving the room a cathedral ceiling.

We got the assistance of a local Tech College student. His task was simple, yet crucial to what we got accomplished. Remove all of the debris we generated and send it down the chute (small stuff) or use a large trashcan to bring it down the stairs (all the lath). He also had the chute-maintenance duty, which consists of removing clogs and spreading out the debris in the dumpster as evenly as possible. (Did I mention that we had blizzard conditions). He worked his tail off for a full 8-hour work day. What an awesome guy.

At 5 PM the student had to leave and we ended up doing some final cleaning of the space. Yesterday I had picked up an Oneida Dust collector. This is an accessory to a shop vac (any brand). It sits basically in-between the vacuum and the nozzle. It requires a bit more assembly than I expected and it does make the vacuum a bit of a contraption. I will post a picture later of what ours looks like.

This dust collector system uses some sort of ‘cyclon’ method to make the dust particles fall into the bucket that is part of the Oneida system, instead of entering into the vacuum. It claims to catch 95% of the dust and debris. Even though I did not measure this claim from a scientific perspective, I have to tell you, this thing works. Normally when I clean after a lath and plaster removal, I try to sweep as much of the dust and then use the vacuum. Even then, I still have to clear the vacuum filter many times. In this case, using this Oneida system, I did not sweep nearly as much and I had to clear the filter once (not even sure if it was all that necessary). The dust collector includes a 5 gallon bucket which I filled 4 times with dust and debris. This site is not sponsored, but I highly endorse the unit from how it works.

This ended up being another long day, almost 11 hours of hard work, fun and crazy weather (I never knew that it was possible to have lightning and thunder while the snow is falling).

Tomorrow’s plan includes the removal of a wall and gutting the ceiling of the staircase area. And if all goes smoothly, complete the gutting work by removing the lath and plaster of the last room upstairs.