Up and away!

Got the jack under the devil under my kitchen. The timber sank a little more than a quarter inch into the devil before it began to raise the who bastardly affair. Some people would say it means I had a quarter inch of bad on the devil, but I am a pragmatist and say that means there are seven and three quarters of decent material.

Some past jakassery includes a chunk out of the devil for an air register, and a few floor joists that are not too good that were cut for cold air returns and gas pipe. I gt the wood, but I need to come up with a couple of lolly columns to put in place of the tree trunk that is there now, and raise the whole works another half inch.

Tomorrow I am going to knock more plaster from the walls right over the jack so the whole works is easier to deal with.

Kitchen or else!

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for the kitchen projects was a chimney that was right in the way. It came out about five feet in the air, and had flues into three different rooms, with plastered surfaces in two of them; the kitchen and the back bedroom. It was dragging the whole works down, and making plaster buckle and that. This is hardly anything new; the wall paper behind the top trim of the built-in cupboard is anti-godlin to the world and God alone knows how long it's been back there. Some long time ago the top was removed, so at least it didn't go through the roof, but there was still plenty for us to fuss with.

Enter my two good helpers, Michael and Madi; neither one is afraid of hard work, so Saturday they came over, we moved enough junk out of the way to get to the offending parts, stopped for dinner, when we all ate my Italian roast beast and fried green beans with home made salsa and blue corn chips, then we took the gas line off of the cookstove and covered the poor old beast in heavy blankets and put it out of the road and dug in and began to remove the swine of a chimney. I had already pulled off a good part of the molding nearby to strip paint from, and most of the plaster around the chimney in the kitchen side was so loose it fell off when the wallpaper quit holding it together,

Two chisels and two three pound hammers were pretty much all it took to do the deed, with plenty of time between breaking bricks out to scoop the fifty years worth of ashes and mank out so it wouldn't permeate the place anymore than it already had. The biggest pain in the bum was getting the first break made, after which the rest came out like legos. The bricks went out the door in five gallon pails, and might get used to drain a concrete slab getting poured there next spring. Madi somehow managed to get a tin pipe that was buried behind my dining room wallpaper out without so much at wrinkling the paper!

For no more chimney than there was, it sure seems like there was enough dust and that-my shop vac died, and the other one got lent out and returned with three coffee filters and a rubber band for a filter, so we had to hillbilly it a little. I ran the exhaust hose from the one that wouldn't work to the intake of the one with no filter, so it would use the filter and collection tank of the burnt out one. Sort of awkward, but worked out well in the end.

When the deed was done we all looked like coal miners, and I stood in the shower until the water boiler was exhausted, as I am told the other two did as well.










Next it's time to jack floors!