studioporn

i pulled into the home depot parking lot this evening and my car started shaking like crazy. initially i was like, wtf? and then i realized that it was a person who was rocking my back bumper. i first i thought it was one of the hizzy depot parking lot panhandlers being a little more crazy than usual, but it turned out to be mo.

he informed me that the woman working the cash register in the tool department was named "ninja." i figured this was just another case of mo confusing surrealist poetry with reality. but i ended up buying a heat gun in the tool department and sure enough, the woman working the cash register was wearing a home depot apron which said "ninja."

right around the time i was thinking "wow, that's kinda random," this older guy walked by and asked her, "how are your exams going?" to which she replied, "great! i got an A in funeral." that statement seemed to make a hell of a lot more sense to him than it did to me. i'm not making this up, and i was fully awake and (mostly) sober when this all occured.

so anyway, i got some more destruction work done tonight. still convinced i could remove the rest of the fireplace bricks without having to resort to pneumatic tools and/or explosives, i grabbed the hand sledge, cold chisel, pry bar, and circular saw. i very carefully chose the sequence of which bricks to remove when and used either the chisel or the circular saw to make enough of an opening between bricks to wedge the pry bar in. with the chisel, i really had to pound the hell out of it to get through that fireclay mortar. there were a few cases where i wasn't getting anywhere at all after pounding like crazy; i resorted to the circular saw in those cases. as long as i made the right decision of which brick to remove next, things went pretty smoothly. i got essentially all of the upper layer of brick out. since the top of the lower layer of brick is only a fraction of an inch above the basement subfloor, i'm somewhat inclined to just let that be, especially since i'm going to have to level out the whole floor anyway (more on that in a sec).

i turned my attention to the floor tiles. i have to be a little bit careful with these since the mastic used to bond them to the floor is about 12% asbestos. that actually sounds worse than it really is--since the material containing the asbestos is non-friable, it's really quite safe to deal with and it can even be disposed of normally rather than having to go through all the special asbestos disposal procedures.

taking the advice of the asbestos contractor i had out there a while back as well as general hazmat removal common sense, i'm wetting the tiles to be removed in order to keep any dust-kicking to a minimum, and then attacking them like crazy with a floor scraper. just to be extra safe, i'm wearing my heavy-duty respirator as well.

pulling up tiles with a scraper takes *forever*. one website i was reading recommended removing vinyl tiles by heating them with a heat gun and then prying them up with a putty knife. i got me a heat gun and tried this technique on a tile, but it took several orders of magnitude more forever to get up, so i just stuck with the scraper technique even though it's a pain in the ass and creates blisters in really weird locations on my hands. i managed to remove about 200 tiles before calling it a night, which means i have somewhere around 500 tiles left to remove.

one nice side effect of getting the floor all wet is it allowed me to get a feel for how level the floor is. which is to say not very. it's amazing how much things can settle over time. once i get all the tile up and fill in the excavated fireplace area with concrete, my plan is to hit the entire basement floor with self-leveling concrete to level the subfloor out so i can put down laminate flooring or something along those lines.