Kitchen wall removal

Yesterday we were out at the Woodbury house taking the wall down. This turned out to be a much longer process than I had anticipated.

First I had to take the plaster and lathe down on the walls next to the wall that is being removed because the boards extended into each of the walls:



These walls will be coming down anyways, I'll be gutting the entire kitchen and putting up greenboard.

Next I took down the boards on the wall, I had to do this carefully as I want to save them for use in the sunroom. The boards are also 15' long so it was tough to get them off by myself:

Once that was done I removed the chair rail, trim, door casings, shoe molding, one row of flooring, and finally the wainscoting from the dining room wall. We were also able to remove the wallpaper without tearing it, we will be reusing the paper:

Then all that was left was to remove the plaster and lathe:

The studs were only toe-nailed into the ceiling, most didn't even touch the floor. It's a wonder the ceiling didn't sag from having a wall hanging from it for a hundred years.

That's as far as we got yesterday. Next up is to try to remove the plaster and lathe from 3'4" of the side walls that will now be part of the kitchen without damaging the plaster next to it that will remain in the dining room.

I'll be using a circular saw for that as a sawzall will vibrate the lathe and destroy the plaster. Once that is down I can build the new wall.