Are we done yet?
Well day two of deconstruction is behind me and I am asking myself, “Are we done yet?” 🙂 I am using muscles that have not seen the light of day in a very long time.
Yesterday saw the last of the kitchen removed including the stove and sub floor. Today will need to be spent finishing to empty the house including finishing sorting through the utility room and also moving my camera network out of the office and into one of the outbuildings.
When I put the shipping container at the side of the house, I did not anticipate how big the excavation would need to be once you took into account the required bank slope. The resulting hole would be right up to the base of the container and as it is against the property line, I would have no way to get from the front of the property to the rear once the hole was dug as the north side of the dig will be right up to the neighbours foundation. So the container will have to come to the front again and get tucked away in the front side yard. I do not want to start loading supplies into the container so cannot take down too much of the house at this time. So by removing about an eight foot slice off the south end of the house, I will have enough room to move the container back to the front of the house (It was moved to the back before the tree protection fencing and temporary power pole were erected.
PS: I had someone contact me while watching the street cam concerned that I was cutting these sheets of plywood with the tiles attached. They were concerned about asbestos. Rest assured, these tiles do not contain asbestos. They are authentic linoleum tiles made from linseed oil. They are totally organic and are able to be composed or burned for energy. Unfortunately, there was no location in the lower mainland that was set up to receive these products, and I have no way to chew them up for compost. So unfortunately, they must go to the dump. I spent about 20 minutes calling 6 different organizations without joy. This is one of the dangers of the green building movement in my opinion. Designers will often choose a material that may not have specification that make it as durable as other options in return for the ‘promise’ that the material is reclaimable at the end of its life span. But if there is no program to reclaim the product, it is going to end up in the landfill just like the more durable product.
Floor consisted of tiles attached to plywood nailed to thin tar paper (a vapour barrier of sorts) covered ship-lap nailed to 2×3 sleepers placed against the concrete slab. Foil covered cardboard was stapled to create a ‘radiant barrier’. I can tell you this barrier did little good in areas with heavy air flow like near the kitchen sink. The floors were always stone code in this area during the winter.
The problem with this construction was that it was a supper highway for ants and we battled the little buggers for many years while living there. Just as you were able to poison or move off one nest, another would appear in a different part of the house.
