April 19-22, 2022
This page is actually being done on October 2, 2024 so as to give no clue to a friend of ours. Martin wanted to surprise Lynda by showing her the Great Room with the fireplace gone. She was!
We finally fired up the fireplace and OOPS! it didn’t draw correctly. It filled the whole house with smoke??!!! Ok, ok, the architect hated the fireplace and he was right, time to fix the problem. It turned out that we didn’t need it anyway. A few months ago, we had a bright sunny day and the temperature was 14° below zero. It didn’t matter; the architect designed the false roof and the real roof to pick up heat in the winter and we do! We actually had one of the clerestory windows open at -14° to cool off the house a bit. Even with the amazing low emissivity glass, we still pick up plenty of heat and we’re so well insulated that the outside temperature matters much less than the solar uptake.
Our contractor set to work demoing it. Everybody in the construction industry calls a demolition job, “Demoing” something.
One really neat thing about this. Our contractor was working on a rebuild in the Marshall fire area and that house needed the same model of fireplace, so we were able to help them out by giving them this one.
Let’s start with the “before” photos. This is the north side. We’re behind the stove, looking south. We’ve pulled everything out except the white herb grower at the right and the two display cases next to the south window wall.
The left or east side.
The east side looking up.
The south side
The west side and the major problem. The fireplace became ethernet central! We had to find a way of dealing with all of the ethernet cables and we’ll see what was done farther down this page.
It’s Friday, April 18, 2022, and the first part of almost every demo job - building the demo tent is done. This keeps all the dust and debris from spreading into the rest of the house. They stack 2x4s two deep and nail them together with short nails so that nothing but wood touches the tile. They then erect the vertical 2x4s and the top header and cover the whole structure with plastic wrap.
By the end of Monday, April 21, 2022, the upper part of the fireplace and the stovepipe that went from the top to the roof is gone.
The tent from the south side. It needed to be big enough for the crew to work inside so there was just enough room for the table.
Inside the tent at the end of Monday. All the stone and tile is gone. That tile is tough! It’s a high end Italian tile and its fiber reinforced, so it really gave the crew a hard time. It bends instead of just breaking like regular tile, so they had to have two guys on the wrecking bars to pry it off.
This is the hole in the roof where the stove pipe used to be. Those massive pieces of metal bolted to the double glue lams with through bolts are what will eventually hold up the rooftop deck. The electrician will also put a light in the middle so the light field doesn’t have a gap in it.