New York Renovator

Believe it or not, there’s a system to removing plaster and lathe from old walls and ceilings. Oh, sure, you could simply get your hammer or crowbar and start blasting away. But plaster and lathe demolition is horribly, horribly dirty. Horribly. You think you have the furniture in the next room protected with plastic sheeting? Ha ha ha! Get your duster ready. We live in our house as we wreck it room by room, and try to be very careful with our demolition. And even after all our sealing the heat vents, duct-taping doors and boxes with plastic sheeting, and gearing up in heavy clothing and bandannas, we still walk out of the room at the end of that day caked in dust.  The stuff is just so pervasive.

Even so, there IS a way to reduce the mess. My methods are tried and true. Someone may have a better method (I’ve yet to see it) but this works, so far, for us.

1. Remove all the plaster FIRST. Then remove the lathe.

If you remove the plaster and lathe on one wall all at once, you’ll wind up with a big, dangerous mess. Lathe will be everywhere with plaster sections collapsed all around it. And since lathe contains nails — if your home is old, the nails will be old and rusty — the material is serious safety hazard. It’s best to first remove the plaster and shovel up the debris, THEN remove the lathe and pick up the wood.

By the way, YES, that IS a salmon pink ceiling. It was underneath a drop ceiling we removed. The trim in this room had once been mustard yellow....

2. Start small. then work in “sheets.”

You only need to create a small hole at first, and then a narrow strip. I always begin in the center of a wall, so I can have two people removing plaster from each side.

I start by pounding a hole in the center of the wall with a hammer. Then, I chip a long, narrow strip from the ceiling to the floor.

3. Use a spade to cut off large sheets of plaster from the lathe.

Don’t use a crowbar or hammer to remove the plaster from the lathe. You’ll wind up with a mushroom cloud of plaster dust over your home! A spade is a small shovel with a flat blade. By the way, DON’T use a typical shovel for removing plaster, either. The rounded end, so perfect for digging holes, will only shear off a tiny portion of the plaster. It’s not worth all that effort.

My spade is very short, about 3 feet high. It has a grippy-type handle, and it’s perfect for removing large sections of plaster quickly and easily. Insert the end of the spade into the narrow strip of plaster you’d made with the crowbar. If the plaster is really sticking to the lathe behind it, you’ll need to ram the spade in. Now chisel the spade in between the plaster and lathe, to separate the plaster from the lathe. You may need to gently push up on the plaster with the spade, to force the plaster to break away from the lathe but not break off. The plaster will fall off in large sheets and the work will go much more quickly.

4. Keep the room tidy.

That sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? But the goal here is safety. And morale. NOBODY like slogging into a filthy workplace. Chop off large sections of plaster, and have a few folks pick up the plaster sections as you go along. We used a gravel shovel (another flat-ended shovel, but much more weighty) to shovel plaster into large garbage cans.

If you pick up the plaster as you go along, it will help reduce dust. You will not need to crunch over mountains of plaster to get to the next section. And believe me– shoveling up crunched and compacted plaster is a LOT more difficult than shoveling up freshly-removed sections of it.

Cleaning the room at the end of the work day did wonders for the morale, too. I found that we were much more likely to start the day with a little more vim and vigor when we entered a clean room to start our work than to begin in a room that was trashed. We lived in the house as we worked, so it was important to keep things clean.

5. Use a spray bottle with water.

It may sound corny, but it helped reduce the dust for us. When the dust in the air got too messy, we used a spray bottle filled with clean water to mist the air. The droplets of water grabbed the dusty particles and the weight of gravity forced it to the floor. Now, it’s important to go easy on the water, or you’ll end up with a muddy pool of plaster in your home.

6. Set a goal, every day.

My modus operandus for a day was to set a goal first thing in the morning, and that included cleanup. When we gutted our kitchen and dining room, I gave us one day to do half the kitchen (three walls) and a second day to do the other half (the fourth wall and the ceiling). It helps keep you focused, so the demolition doesn’t drag on forever. It’s very physical, laborious work. At the end of the day, we were EXHAUSTED. But settings goals helped, because we knew we HAD to have our house back again, and fast.

7. Be prepared for surprises.

I suppose every old-house home owner has stories to tell about what they find in their walls– old bones, newspapers, wayward toys, etc. We’ve seen all that. I was surprised to discover very old Art Deco wallpaper (hand painted!!) behind the chimney, though.

We also discovered some less encouraging things. Someone years before had “capped” the exhaust to an old stove pipe with plaster, inserted a few old broken brick bits, and plastered over that. Over time, the plaster capping the exhaust vent cracked, allowing carbon monoxide from the furnace and water tank to seep into the room. *sigh*

We’ve also found a rainbow of weirdo colors, a kind of historic home diary left behind by previous homeowners.

Be prepared for other strange things, too. I found studs filled with soft bricks on all exterior walls. No contractor or carpenter I spoke with knew what it was. They attributed it to “old timers” and their odd building practices… but I later found out that this brick is called “noggin.” It may have been used as a insulator (unlikely, in my opinion), but most probably as a fire stop, since my home is a balloon frame home.

I hope these tips have helped you some. Good luck on your project!

New York State offers a grant to have your home inspected by a contractor from the power company to do an energy audit. They visit your home, look around, and offer suggestions and services needed to make your home more energy efficient. I had been on a waiting list (well, two, actually) since February, and my turn for the first grant rolled around last week. The contractor was here much longer than I anticipated, but I think the audit was informative. The final result?

Our 1855 home is hopelessly inefficient and wastes a ton of energy.

Duh.

This is what an energy audit entails, and this is how the house fared.

1. If your home in not insulated, the company will insulate it for you.

How I WISH I could do this! However, our home has bricks in between the studs (called “noggin”) and therefore the walls cannot be insulated. Also, we have the old knob-and-tube wiring, and it is illegal to insulate with this outdated kind of wiring (fire hazard). Insulating the walls would save us a lot of money toward our very high heating bills, but I cannot insulate until I gut the entire home. *sigh* Below is a photo I took of the living room walls, after I removed the plaster and lathe. The bricks are in the exterior walls all around the house, up to the top of the first floor. The second storey does not have these bricks. This may explain why the upstairs is absolutely FREEZING in the winter. And the lack of furnace registers may contribute, too. lol

2. If you have an old and inefficient furnace, hot water tank, and/or refrigerator, the company will purchase new ones for you.

Because of the flooding we had in 2006, we got a new furnace then. And our water tank is not terribly old (it’s been under a few floods but works well enough). And we bought a fridge about three years ago. So I missed out on the big-ticket replacements. If only they had offered to gut the house or re-wire!

3. The power company will replace all your incandescent light bulbs with the new compact florescent bulbs (we got six replacements, saving us $60 in bulb costs!) These bulbs generally last for up to ten years and reduce energy consumption. This makes me very happy. They are brighter than the bulbs we had, too.

4. The company will seal all air leaks (holes through which plumbing and electrical wires go, from the basement to the attic). Because of our plaster walls, bad plumbing which needs replacement, and 1920s wiring, this is not possible. The contractor did say he would insulate the rim joists in the basement (the wood sills which rest on the foundation walls). These have big gaping holes and I am thankful that they will do this for me.

5. The power company hands out brochures and information on how you can save energy and save money.

This we already do. We live extremely frugal. It’s the house itself that is wasteful. The house was built before electric wiring (even before gas lighting!), before indoor plumbing, before energy efficiency. They did not foresee needing to insulate the walls or making the walls thick enough for vent stacks, etc. Like the contractor said, “Those old guys didn’t make it easy, did they?”

Conclusion: I am doing everything I can to be as energy-efficient as possible, but the house is leaking energy like a sieve. It’s recommended that we renovate.

I repeat: duh!

I’m trying, I’m trying! lol We’ve got one room completely restored, and two rooms with completely new wiring. Two other rooms now have switched lights (see my post about that, here) but share one electrical receptacle. Like I’ve said before, it takes a TON of money to renovate a home these days.

Also: The contractor does check for natural gas leaks, and he found that we had THREE. Old pipe fittings (“old” as in 60 years, maybe) were crumbling. These were fixed in a day. These guys work fast- a sub-contractor came, shut off the gas, replaced the pipes, and was gone in two or three hours. It was amazing!

The energy audit was at no cost to me– it was part of a county-wide grant for eligible homeowners. They will assess your energy needs (“needs” not “wants”: they won’t install cable patch panels or luxury stuff) and help you out. They also give tips on saving energy (hang your clothes on a clothesline, shut off your “vampire” appliances like TVs and computers, etc).

If you are interested, contact your local HEAP office or Community Action group in your county. The second grant, which I hope to participate in soon, will inspect my windows, doors, etc. I am hoping they will replace my windows for me. These windows are 100-years old; some are cracked and many are moldy from age.

In two days, we completely demolished the Living Room. What a dirty, tiresome job. One 15 x 17 foot room shed enough plaster to fill 10 32-gallon trash cans, with some to spare. What a mess, but well worth it. I am relieved to be rid of the junk. There IS a reason why someone invented sheetrock, and why it is so popular today!

In between all the studs on the first floor are mortared bricks. The bricks do not continue into the second floor.

We consider the bricks (“noggin” as they are called) to be a blessing and a curse. For one, they do have some insulating qualities, in restricting air flow and dust. And they keep the downstairs cool in the summer.

However, they disintengrate with the introduction of water and/or movement. In an old house, water and movement are a given. Thus, some bricks have deteriorated. Also, previous owners punched holes in the brick to install electrical outlets.

After much agonzing, we are going to keep the brick intact.It would be too cost prohibitive to remove it and replace it with insulation, and I think it also helps to keep the studs straight.

I found out many things after we removed the plaster. I found out why previous owners had installed an ugly cardboard drop ceiling: one part of the plaster ceiling had cracked all the way across when the center beam of the house settled. I don’t know why someone would go to all the trouble and expense of installing a horrid drop ceiling instead of removing the plaster, but, oh well. I am so happy to have that drop ceiling in the landfill now.

The wiring is frightful. Mice have chewed through wires still active. I don’t quite know what to do with them, as these wires go somewhere into the flooring abyss in the second floor.

Well, now that we have torn apart the walls and have seen the guts of the room, we can finally begin to make plans and set some priorities. I am determined to redo not just the walls and floor, but to redo the very bad and aged wiring, and reconfigure the furnace ducting (which is a disastrous tangled mess and dirty, to boot).

More later!