Demo without a Dumpster: Day 2

Day two is DONE.

Would you believe me if I told you that today we had a fire, power outage, and the dumpster didn’t show up?

Let’s start with the good news.

Wallpaper is totally gone from girl’s room one. I have to give credit to my kids who did a large portion of the work and were able to remove almost all the wallpaper without damaging any of the drywall.

Yesterday we used a steamer, it worked well, especially on the seams. Today we used a sprayer.

Do not try to remove wallpaper without one of these. I’ll write it all up in more detail once I finish removing all the wallpaper in the house, but this sprayer made the job go about five times faster than yesterday.

We also were able to get the gigantic fridge out of the cabinet. The floor was not tiled all the way to the wall so the fridge was jammed in the cabinet and catching on the lip of the tile. Because it is huge (56 inches wide) it was nearly impossible to get out.

Now it is sitting in the middle of the kitchen waiting to be moved into the garage.

Notice the mirrors? We call it the diet fridge. Think you want another bowl of ice cream? Walk up to one of the mirrored doors and think again!

It is actually a nice big (although older) fridge so we are hoping to use it in the garage.

We also made a lot of progress pulling up the molding in the hallway and bedrooms. Since the carpet went up the wall, we need to pull down the old molding and replace it with regular molding.

I had a helper with this job.

This has truly been a family effort. The kids have worked really hard the last two days on the house. Not only do I love their good attitudes, they are learning some great life skills.

Now to the not so good news.

Today we were supposed to have a dumpster delivered. The dumpster is critical because now that the carpet has been pulled up, the amount of debris in the house is starting to get in the way.

Not to mention all the nails and tacks, and other not great things to try to walk around laying around.

And the mountain of garbage now sitting in our front yard waiting for the dumpster.

We probably won’t be winning yard of the month in October.

After numerous calls, we were finally told at 6:30 pm that they didn’t get to our delivery today. Needless to say I was not happy. We’ve asked for some extra rental days and they gave us 3 extra days, but if the dumpster doesn’t arrive tomorrow morning I’ll be letting you know exactly where not to order a dumpster in tomorrow’s post.

As I mentioned the kids have been great assistants. I’ve been letting them help with the wallpaper removal because it seemed the safest. That was until Cora sprayed water into a light socket while spraying the wall.

This caused the socket to spark and eventually catch fire and then the fire dropped on to the carpet catching it on fire. Thankfully no one was hurt, but after that I made Cora chief molding officer and gave the spray job to an older kid with better aim.

Speaking of wallpaper removal- since we finished with the first room we started on the master bedroom. I was excited to work on this room because it only had one wall of wallpaper.

It was going well until I realized that the wallpaper had been wallpapered over other wallpaper. So we had four layers to remove. We got about half of that wall done and then the power went out in the neighborhood.

At first I thought our little fire caused the power outage, but then I realized it had been a few hours since the fire and all our neighbors were without power too. I was relived to know everyone was without it, so it wasn’t my fault! 🙂

Seriously this is such a mess. I’ll be glad when we are done with wallpaper!

During the power outage, the big guys started chipping up the tile in the dining room. I call it anger management therapy. We are going to have to rent machine to get all the mortar up, but the tile is coming up pretty easily.

Work continued on the kitchen. The fridge wall cabinets came out and we had to remove the backsplash. That did not come off as well as the wallpaper.

I see some drywall work in our future.

The kitchen is basically all construction debris at the point. Hopefully tomorrow the dumpster will come and we can get some of the junk out of the house and get demo finished by the weekend.

The kids like the house and seem to enjoy working on “their rooms.” I hope their good attitudes last!

There is a trellis outside my office that is covered with vines/ trees/ ???. The boys think it is the best thing EVER! I think a snake is going to drop on my head every time I stand under it.

Until tomorrow….

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