Demolition of a 1922 addition to my 1895 Victorian.

The addition is the last bump-out on the left. That is my boss '71 Ford parked out front.
Note the junk sticking out of the truck bed. I always seem to be getting ready to go to the dump or actually going to the dump.

Another look at the addition. It added a kitchen and bath upstairs and a kitchen and bath downstairs when the place was converted to 4 apartments. The door leading to no place on the second story used to have stairs leading to it. The stairs were gone when I bought the place. The louvered vent next to the door is what is known as a California Cooler. They were popular in the 20s before the refrigerator was invented. The vent led to a cabinet in the kitchen were people would keep their dairy products. The shelves in the cabinet were wire mesh and that allowed the cool costal air to circulate around and keep things cool. Even in the dead of summer the nights can drop in to the 40s and 50s.

The roof facade is off, inside gutted, and doors and windows removed. The roof was Several layers of mopped on tar and asphalt, topped off with a lovely layer of EPDM rubber. In some places it was nearly 3 inches thick. By far the worst part of the demolition.

The roof is gone (Ugh!!) and the siding is starting to come off. I'm too cheap to rent scaffolding so I removed everything from the inside. Kind of tricky working alone but not so much as one nail ended up where I didn't want it to. It helps to be a control freak.

Ta da!. Down to the framing. This is where it gets tricky. Question: How many boards can you remove with out the rest crashing down into the neighbors yard?

And there you have it. The top story off. There is actually a middle floor between the first and second floor. It is only about 3 feet high. I'm not sure why they built it that way but it makes me think of the movie "Being John Malcovich" where the guy worked on the 7 and a half floor of the office building and found the secret passage to John Malcovich's brain.

But wait, there's more! We're not done yet. At least at this point I'm not working 30 feet off the ground with out a net.

Guess what I found? In one corner of the kitchen I found these little buggers. They don't much care for the hart redwood but they love the sap wood and the fir flooring. They were contained to one corner of the kitchen. These are about the size of an ant and I'm not sure if they are termites or powder post beetles. Needless to say, anything thing that looked munched on went directly in to the truck and directly to the dump. Do not pas Go. Do not collect $200.

All of the walls are down. All that is left is flooring and sub floor. At this point I've going to erect sacffolding so I can fix the siding. I need to rebuild the flare out for the shingles and replace 4 or 5 rows of octogonal shingles. There are also a few rows of the shiplap siding damaged behind that plastic. And I will want to go from the 2 doors currently, down to one.

I ended up removing almost all of the siding from the section. There were 3 or 4 damaged rows and there were 2 doors. I didn't want a seam that showed where the other door was so I just took it all off and started over. A lot more work than I anticipatec. That is a temporary door. I have a 5 panal Victorian door that will be going there. You can see here I still need to fix the window. There is a big hole behind the plastic but it will be covered by shingles. That is where they tied in to the main house water supply for the kitchen and bath in the second story of the addition.



Here you can see the window is trimmed out. This was really a challange. I had to replace 6 - 1X6s and a piece of 1/4 round. Some of the pieces had to be beveled to wrap around the corner and then filled with the 1/4 round. I was able to use salvaged redwood planking from the addition to rebuild it. I still need the crown molding under the window sill but that will probably come next spring. Right now I'm just trying to get things buttoned down for the winter.



The view from above. From the top of the flat roofed addition it was an easy stroll to the top of the hipped roof of the main house. I took the opportunity to scrape some fungus off the roof and snap a few photos. That is Humboldt Bay and the city of Arcata in the back ground. My neighborhood is roughly defined as running from 5th to 14th streets and J to P streets. My house is on M St. On M St. between 5th and 14th most of the houses were built between 1880 and 1920. Of all of those houses there are 3 really tall Victorians. Mine is 1of those 3. That is why this picture looks like it was taken from a balloon or something.