Coal Dust & Electricity

I can't imagine a time where entire cities ran on coal. All the steam boilers, smelters, and fireplaces being shoveled full of this burning black rock. Everything, everywhere all dusty and sooty. The city still essentially runs on coal, it is just burned in a central location far away where no one has to think about it and piped in as nice clean electricity. Anyway, to my point.. Old houses used coal fireplaces for warmth. That translates into today as lots of coal dust and soot pouring out of all the demo areas. I've got the upstairs quarantined pretty well, so fortunately it isn't an issue. I just had hoped that I would be rid of the stuff once I finished wallowing in it under the house. Guess not.

Buzzsaws great grandpa was a coal dog

Balloon!!!

As I was losing myself in demolition and thoughts of how I was going to go about finishing everything, I hit a major road block. This old house is balloon framed! When we bought this place I knew that there was a chance it was indeed balloon framed, but didn't see any obvious signs. I was hopeful it wasn't because they started moving to platform framing around the time the house was built.

Balloon framing...

Everybody Loves Destruction!

The upstairs demo is moving right along. I've gotten over the self leveler on the floor problem and moved on to other things. As the demo progresses, I just keep finding more and more goofy "fixes" or unskilled DIY projects from the previous tenants. Hopefully it is truly unskilled DIY and not actual contractors that did this... If you hire a contractor, make sure to get references and actually have some concept of what work they will be doing, what steps they need to take, and how the finished product is supposed to look. Anyway, I snapped some pics of the overall demo so far and some things that I've run into.