so last night, rob dropped one of the stones from the fireplace on his foot while picking it up to move into the garage. turns out that broke his toe and he's on crutches now. the only person who should be injuring themselves during this whole process is me, so i'm kicking my "safety nazi" setting up a few notches so make sure this doesn't happen again. and rob now has a lifetime supply of studio time.
matt came over tonight and helped with the next phase of fireplace destruction. this is how it looked when we started:
after removing a few bricks, i began to get a feel for how the whole structure was laid out. there's one nice brick layer, and then everything behind that is a completely unstructured mish-mash of brick and concrete block. rather than removing layers from front to back, i'm having to do more of a top-down removal and assess the structural integrity pretty regularly to make sure the whole thing isn't going to come toppling down and crushing me.
we managed to remove a lot of bricks in the 3 hours we worked on it, but there are just soooo many of them that progress feels really slow. we removed somewhere on the order of 150 bricks tonight, around 130 of which were in good shape and will be donated to construction junction or something. this is how the fireplace looks now:
the excavation is starting to hit the core of the fireplace and i want to examine the flue connection and stuff more closely under better lighting conditions before proceeding, so we put the rest of that work on hold.
i started doing some exploratory destruction of the top-secret eastern european black site which the CIA has codenamed "bathroom". i've seen some pretty horrid pittsburgh basement bathrooms in my time, but this one really takes the cake. here are some "before" photos, although they don't come anywhere near close to capturing the gestalt of the space:
that big drain pipe running down through the middle of the shower is coming from the kitchen sink upstairs. it's looking (and smelling) a bit funky, so i'm going to have the plumber look at it when he comes out to do all the kitchen stuff.
i had planned to crack open the window in there to air out the intermittent sewer smells that sometimes grace the room, but when i went to slide the window it just kind of fell apart. you can kind of notice it in the photo. it's no biggie, since that space is going to be filled with glass block eventually.
that shower tile is something else. it reminds me of the building where i went to high school. except this is white tile instead of green. it's some of the thickest tile i've ever seen. it's the kind of stuff that falls into that gray area between "tile" and "wall". i guess back in the 50s you could seem all intellectual for having existential shower tile (note: i get first dibs on the use of "existential shower tile" as a band name). you can see to the left of the drain pipe where i pulled off some of the tiles to see what they're all about. for one thing, they're damn sharp when they crack. i sliced up my finger pretty well while trying to retrieve a shard that got wedged between the drain pipe and the wall. you may notice the pink tile behind the tile-wall i removed. for reasons not entirely clear to me, they felt the need to cover one layer of hideous tile with another layer of even more hideous tile. i feel i will go through my entire life never understanding this shower, which is fine since it will be showererd with destruction any day now.
