In my last post, we spent the day removing plaster from the wooden laths. And what a mess it created! Now, we just needed to remove the laths. We decided to clean as we go this time, with one of us removing the laths (Grant) and the other cleaning (me). This way, the muck didn’t get too out of hand! If you were wondering, yesterdays mess took well over an hour to clean up. Yuk!
It’s at this stage renovating when I begin to think “why did we start this?” “maybe we should have just bought a new build house” and “I wonder how much damage this dust is doing to my lungs” you get my drift.
I think (or maybe hope) everyone renovating goes through this stage; for me, it’s when things get mega dusty. Dust is awful, it just moves through the whole house, and before you know it, it’s everywhere! It’s not that kind of dust that you find on an ornamental shelf once a month, it’s thick dirty never-ending dust. You can hoover in the morning and by evening it’s back! When your bathroom looks like this, you really don’t want that around the whole house!
But I guess we’re pushing through to the other side – the ceiling is down, the dust is kind-of hoovered and it’s onwards and upwards from here! Things have to get messy before they get better, that’s just the way of it.
Removing the wooden laths wasn’t actually too difficult; the wood’s pretty thin, easy to snap, and then we just used a crow-bar to remove the nails. Obviously, there was much less rubble involved, but the dust and dirt behind the laths was still insaaane. Black filth continued to cover the entire room, in fact in came down in dust-clumps. Thinking about it, that dust is basically years and years of dead skin, hair, animal, who knows what… all falling down over our heads. Bit of a grim thought really…
But here we go! The laths are down, the ceiling is looking a lot tidier!
We also had to remove some fibreglass insulation (which was also disgustingly dusty!) because it was only held up by the laths so was no longer supported. There’s an attic bedroom above the bathroom (you can see the floorboards in these pictures!) and then we have the eaves towards the exterior wall. We’ll need to re-insulate this section eventually!
So that’s it for today’s progress. Apologies for the terrible photos; the light is now out-of-action and the flash kept picking up all the dust, but hey, that’s renovation realities for you. Onwards and upwards – Next stop is to fit an extractor fan!
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