Last weekend my neighbor came over to help again, and we finally got the “tear-off room” (as we called it) torn off.
Above left, with all the roofing and siding removed. I got really covered in dirt, as I had to cut through the roofing from below.
A last look into the tear-off room from the laundry room (left), and the view from up above. It’s strange taking something apart like this. Most contractors pull out a sledge hammer, and smash everything down. It’s done in half a day. Then they have a huge pile of landfill.
I’ve been trying to carefully deconstruct the space so that I can reuse much of the materials. Still, there’s quite a pile: Roofing breaks up, and has come to the end of its useful life anyway; some wood is too rotten or broken or small to salvage; the old aluminum single pane window didn’t slide any more and the catch was broken….
But the result of working like this is that it’s exactly the reverse of building it.
Here’s Nick, my neighbor-assistant, monkeying from the last of the roof joists before he tore them down. Above right, when my neighbor on the other side came out and saw this, he told me a story.
He reminiced how Mr Simmons, who was born in about 1870, built this room. Even though the ceiling in this room was about 5′-10″ high, apparently Mr Simmons was about my height. He built the room as a sewing room for his wife. “Mrs Simmons’ Sewing Room” makes it sound so nice; I can almost forget what a dingy, damp, moldy, cramped, low-ceiling little cell it was.
Above is the view of the back of the laundry room. The two doorways are boarded up right now. I plan to put windows all across this wall, looking out onto the garden. Even though Mrs Simmons’ sewing room was tiny, it really took up a lot of the garden.
Now I have a big pile of wood. Nick started pulling nails. But I still have a huge pile to pull nails out of.