Day Four--Demolition Derby

There was no derby, for the record, but demolition proper did begin today.

But long before, I spent the morning doing some addition IKEA assembly: this time, the sink. It's (mostly) assembled, and here it is in situ (below, #1), just so we can imagine how it'll look. It adds a lot of storage to the bathroom, and it nicely fits over the shutoff valves and drains that are already there. Except that, as you can see in #2, the shelf is at exactly the wrong height, and prevents all access to the shutoff valves. I'll change that before installation.

I then took a long break to go to campus and talk to a graduate student who needed advice on her dissertation and to talk to my admin assistant for the coming five years. All good, but on the way, I dropped off the bathroom mortise lock to a locksmith -- keys should be ready tomorrow. Once back I capped the shutoff valves in the bathroom: I was going to be doing some heavy and physical labor in the bathroom, and I didn't want to accidentally turn on one of the valves and spray water everywhere from the unsecured ⅜" valves that lead to the sink supply lines. Look at those beautiful brass caps!

Then, onto the main task for today: starting the demolition. So you literally walk into the room, and hit the wall with a hammer until you punch a hole through. Then you use a hammer, a chisel and a sledgehammer to do the same thing to the whole wall, trying to not hit and destroy pipes or electrical lines or other infrastructure (brief theory thought: the reason the right-wing always wins arguments about the public good is because infrastructure is invisible to the mind's eye -- discuss). The job proved to be insanely dirty and dusty, but it went much faster than expected!

Okay, that really took about an hour. A couple of funny things about the video, though: 1) I had to stop because of a phone call related to the project (bad news about my toilet, as you'll learn later); 2) I also stopped filming because the work is *insanely* dusty, and my iPhone was thickly coated in a way that suggested it would soon stop working if I kept filming; 3) if you look very carefully in the last ½ second of the video, a tile falls off the wall *after* I've already left the room -- I appreciate that. 

When I decided to stop for a cocktail and dinner (see below, coconut curry rice with a quickly seared trout) at 6:00 PM or so, I was about ¾ of the way done, so hopefully I can finish it up tomorrow. In the meantime, here is the impressive hole I left in the bathroom wall:

And here is the much more problematic pile of rubble, very post aerial bombardment ca. 1945. I lost several tools and drop cloths in this pile of rubble (seriously!). I had to use a shovel to put it into giant Hefty bags, and then discover that since it's literally concrete, it's far too heavy to put much into a plastic bag.

Thought it all, kitty assisted in the way he knows best.

I also continued the archiving of home movies (turns out one of them needs to be re-done -- good thing I saved everything!), looked a bit more into tile, got a butcher block countertop for the new kitchen cabinet, and ran into a significant issue with the toilet I ordered: it doesn't exist. Currently waiting to see if Lilya will approve the okay-but-really-less-attractive backup toilet. It turns out that you're supposed to order tiles and toilets like a month before you need to work on the room, of you want it just so. Anyway, re-thinking the color scheme: dark tiles for the floor, still white for the sides. Or maybe white-is floor, dark tiles, light paint for the part above the tiles? Anyway, closing in.