11/13/2005

Today was a busy day for house work. We pulled up the remaining 6 feet of carpet and removed about 60% of the nail strips. Just FYI, the last bit of carpet had to wait until I had unloaded two very full bookshelves. The entire acoustic tile ceiling is now a pile of rubble, as is the trim surrounding it. And, between yesterday and today, a full wall of wallpaper has been removed. That leaves us with 2 more walls in the living room, one of which is mostly doorway. There's a little wallpaper in the upstairs hallway, but most of that area is doorways, so it shouldn't be too much work. I'd say about 8 more hours, and all of the wallpaper will be gone (Hallelujia!!!).

Tomorrow, Shayne will begin working on removing the furring strips, which are actually more like 1 by 2s. And of course, they were attached with nails. Big nails. And lots of them. He's going to be using a cutting bit on a Dremel, which worked well on our test strip. He cuts the board on either side of the nail, then uses vise grips to pull the nail and remaining little piece of wood out of the ceiling. We didn't want to use a pry bar; since there are so many nails we thought it would just damage the ceiling more, and we had to get a little creative. We'll see how well it works tomorrow.

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