Let me salute those of you who live in an apartment. Your living arrangement is much better for the planet. I’ve lost count of the amount of construction debris we’ve sent to the landfill in the 20 years we’ve owned this old house. I filled another dumpster yesterday re-opening the wall between the two front rooms and restoring the house to its original floor plan.
Should you want to attempt this yourself, Fine Homebuilding has a nice article on how to contain dust during demolition. It involves lots of plastic, an argument for not screwing up old houses in the first place. Their tips worked:
- Wall off the area with plastic sheeting.
- Put construction debris in plastic bags (the big orange store sells extra thick garbage bags for this purpose).
- Vacuum like there’s no tomorrow.
Here’s what it looked like before (note the cracked drywall sheets that, I discovered, were barely attached to the studs):
During:
And after:
I don’t have a picture, but I removed the studs after confirming that the old header was adequate (it’s not a load bearing wall). The next step will be to fix the plaster (I’m hiring this out). When the plasterers are done I’ll frame the opening with molding I’ll fabricate in my woodshop to match the doorways in the rest of the house.
A tip of the hat to the folks who do this dirty and dangerous work every day.