Monday, 0700 hours at Hometek, there’s nothing for me to do but irritate Jim by watching him hang the Hayward gates in a frame.  I had been thinking, ‘I need a new lunch spot’….be careful what you wish for…

Arrives the boss man.  “I’m putting you on a job for a few days.  It’s a demo.”

No, not trotting out software for a potential client – a demolition.

“We’re gutting a house.”

My gut seethes with fear and loathing – I know what ‘gutting’ means.

No, no I didn’t

This unsuspecting, quiet kitchen is about be nuked.

3605 Eastfield Road is a perfectly fine 1988 vintage upper middle class two-story, three bedroom house.  We will leave a few walls untouched.  We will leave no flooring untouched.

Walls – out.  Showers – tile showers – vamonos.  Hardwood flooring – gone.  Kitchen – effaced.

And that was where we started: shifting into the garage the washer, dryer, range, built-in microwave and convection oven, the sink and the fridge.

Then: utterly shatter what remained.  Perfectly satisfactory cabinets, walls, and floor ripped out and tossed into the dump-bound trailer.  We averaged two a trailers a day.

I’m working with Hometek’s crack demo crew: Raymundo and Marcos, both younger and certainly more accustomed to the physical toil than I.

Kitchen after three guys with hammers drop the bomb.

By mid-afternoon, I’m nearly delirious with fatigue.  And in dragging one of the trash barrels – which is the main transport of ripped out dry wall and tile from the wreckage to the trailer spotted in the driveway – it tips over and the edge neatly slams into my bad, right knee just below the joint like a low, blindside tackle.  I feel the medial ligaments cry out.  Marvelous

I’m so nackered by mid-afternoon that all I can do is pry off the stairs the carpet retainers – which are wooden lath wickedly spiked with tacks facing out and out, tacks that retain the carpet we’d lugged out to the dump trailer (all of it perfectly useful) but now tacks that attack the hands.

Oh, and my laptop died the day before so before I can ooze home to collapse, I have to leave the dead laptop at PC People: “It’ll be a couple of days.”  Translated: It’ll be a couple of days before we start to diagnose your problem.

Who has time (hours even) to have their laptop sit in the shop waiting to be diagnosed?

Demo Schwag:

A slight compensation for a day of wanton destruction…

Six ¼” thick glass shelves, four glass insert cabinet doors, oak mantle, four 2’ square ¾” ply pieces, and a Kohler faucet.

TUESDAY –

Hardwood flooring removal – stoop labor.  My right knee problematic, double wrapped.

In spite of being glued to the sub-floor, most of the planks came out semi-easily, which cannot be said about the cramps in my lower back….

Imagine 1500 square feet of hardwood floor excisement.  Also imagine yourself bending down to harvest the asparagus for the luncheon salad, but in this case, in the same posture pound a pry bar with your 18 ounce Estwing under an edge of the flooring, suddenly and violently thrust your weight down, and hope that the flooring snaps up (and not into your face or groin).

Repeat.

600 times.

For amusement, collect the three and four foot long pieces (if they maintained their integrity, which you wished they did) and trot them out to the trailer.

Demo Schwag:

4’ x 2’ bath mirror, 12 spindles from the staircase landing banister

WEDNESDAY –

What was is now not.

Knocking out walls.  I assumed responsibility for multiple wall removal (with drywall) in what was once the bath of the small upstairs bedroom.

Blessed be Sawzall.

THURSDAY –

Removal of linoleum, shower destruction, more wall removal and drywall effacement.

I finish yesterday’s wall removal, then tear up the floors in the former laundry room and downstairs bedroom bath.  It’s a tedious process of slamming the end of a crow bar under the linoleum pad between it and the subfloor, then jerking up.  By lunch, I’m toast, and there’s still another tile shower to remove.

I couldn’t do it, couldn’t imagine picking up and wielding a sledge, I could barely move.

Time expanded.  Every cell in my body was shutting down.  Slammed a trash barrel (you’d think I would have learned my lesson…) into my left tibia nearly breaking it and immediately raising an huge hematoma.

Marcos somehow knew this and took on the shower himself, in spite of spending all morning crushing the upstairs tile shower with a sledge.

I apologized.  He said, “I saw it in your face that you couldn’t.”

Demo Schwag:

5’ feet of ½” gas pipe (the plumbers were here – Nathan Bradley – to cap all the lines from the walls that have been removed or will be) soon to be pipe clamp.

VIERNES –

Lucid dream – Lauralan and some unknown filly, stuffing some prig into a sheet metal and duct tape coffin.

68 closed, detour to job.

No Raymundo – he’s off to Oregon for a young relative’s coming of age.

So to Marcos and I, after horsing out the downstairs tile destruction, I clean upstairs.

Premature.

The plan for upstairs and downstairs.

More walls to be taken out.  I look at the plan, I can see what walls ought remain and what walls vamonos, and yet every day the Bossman arrives with yet another wall to remove that yesterday was to stay.

In the time it takes me to tear out a couple of square feet of dry wall and excise two windows of same, Marcos rips out three walls.  Super Hombre!

Luncha.

Afternoon spent mostly in clean up, titanic pile of debris downstairs all has to be shifted.

Long week.

PC People (Michael back from some medical hiatus) says laptop infected, but cure is known, sort of.

Home – Prof arrives bearing Strength.  Friday is unconfined.

Some Notes On Demolition

1. Everywhere you are about to put your hand or knee there is the pointy end of a nail ready
2. When you thought you had torn out enough, you were wrong
3. You swept up the debris too soon
4. Crowbar thrusting will propel you off the ladder
5. Never, ever look at a clock – you’ll be disappointed at how far away lunch is
6. The last hour of the working day lasts 3 hours
7. Removing Drywall spelled inside out reads “Won’t Come Off”
8. Stucco is applied and meant to remain until the Universe implodes.

SLACTERDAY –

Achy and tired, set out for the other side of town to deposit the week’s pay (Four Beautiful Words) in the only local ATM that will accept same, then get a $40 oil change.

Thence north to Marina and Grocery Cheaplet.

It was the right idea at the wrong time.

Traffic lock-down and no end in sight.

Before I knew what I was into, I was inside the perimeter of a marathon.

Not the kind that qualifies you for the Boston, but the kind where all the ‘runner’s’ dress like clown nightmares.  Hundreds of vehicles utterly stranded, all intersections of possible escape blocked.  It wasn’t until the tail end of the tutu traipers crossed the main highway of Marina that traffic was allowed, fitfully, to proceed.

Circled back to GC and bacon, Hebrew National franks and no cheese deals and by this time, the parade had cleared.  Figured I  was safe.

Wrong.

Turned south on Del Monte and found myself once more inside the ‘race’ perimeter where traffic was yet again utterly halted.  20 minutes until the cops cleared us to go.  Purgatory.  While this may seem quaint to anyone who regularly ‘drives’ the 405, for here it is apoplexy.

Tonic: Return to The Shop and Creation after a 40 hour week of destruction.

Creation and elaboration on The Prof’s rustic porch rocker.

Progress (if we can label it that)

Used a blind groove for the upper end of the seat back on the edge banding.

Firmed up the mortise and tenon/leg to barrel stave joint via screw-through
Cut and drilled for pocket hole joinery the chair side-to-side frames
Edge banded the seat with tongue and groove to hide the seat board end grain

Entertained semi-deep questions about why I used barrel staves as rockers which have slightly different curvatures

Nothing for it but follow through.  If this be the Second Prototype, so be it.

You cannot imagine how fine it felt to be making, instead of destroying, again.

Real Man Food for a (semi) real guy.

And to be on the Penthouse deck that evening grilling up some REAL food.

LUNES –

Further drywall removal around the windows, then Tom drops the bomb: frag the kitchen: walls and ceiling.  Job security.  Some people pay hundreds of dollars to a gym, and today I’m getting paid $20/hour for an excellent upper body workout.

Luncha, then more drywall removal and Tom drops the bomb: frag the stucco.

Marcos here demonstrates an early attempt to use the grinder to cut off the stucco – and this is the EASY part.

It was even worse than I imagined, and I’m flagged from too much upper body work out.

MARTES –

Stucco.

Remove.

Me either.

Stucco (a form of concrete) is applied to a plywood substrate on which is first nailed tarpaper, and over this on the vertical surfaces chicken wire on and to which the stucco is slathered and adheres.

The horizontal, overhead surfaces use a slotted metal sheet.  All of this must be either sliced with a grinder into extractable sections, or flat out pulverized with a sledge or percussion hammer.

A 25 pound percussion hammer effectively scrags – at waist height and below – the stucco matrix. And this is the EASY section.

Horrible, even with power tools, heavy at waist level, but there’s a 12 foot long beam 10 feet off the deck and 200 square feet of horizontal overhead to frag.

Everyone should enjoy it once.  And only once.

MIERCOLES –

For once, I know driving into the job site what is on the dance card: remove even more stucco (although not as much as yesterday, but much of it overhead) and attack the massive concrete slab.

Just as I enter the gated enclave of Eastfield I wonder, “I wonder what Mexicans we’re going to engage to slag out that concrete ….?”

And then it hit me, Soy Mexicano (I AM the Mexican).

Marcos and I spent some quality early morning time removing 5,673 staples from the kitchen sub-floor because we didn’t want to ramp up the percussion hammers too early in the AM, and it was well that we had this pedestrian task as the power went out, twice.

About 0900 we had power.  Super Hombre Marcos does the lion’s share of hacking out the overhead stucco.  He’s six steps up a ladder horsing a 25 pound percussion hammer overhead.

Johnson gamely follows on the overhead with his 10 pound hammer, taking frequent (nearly all the time) breaks.

We break for luncha with most of the stucco off and now look forward to hammering that slab.

Stupid Johnson thinks that we have only to pound out a two-foot width suitable for digging the foundation.  Stupid, no?

Todos vamonos.

WHAT!

“That is what he said, dig it all out.”

I can’t fucking believe that one, I don’t argue too much with Marcos.  He takes his orders and does his job, and I work for him.

Super Hombre jacking the crete.

The percussion hammers we have actually do a credible job and the main slab is ‘only’ eight inches thick, but clearly we’re going to need to call in the heavy artillery for the step if we’re to get ‘er done before St. Swithin’s Day.

Raymundo shows with a rental jackhammer.  It’s a mean looking spud on its own trolley, the thing weighing in at about the mass of a transit bus.

I take my turn and clearly haven’t the skill Raymundo owns – you don’t want to let the thing penetrate too far into the ‘crete or it will jam; and you want to drill in at an angle toward an open face.

JUEVES –

Go For Broke, and I got broke.

It’s all morning busing the slab into fragments ranging from golf ball to anvil size chunks, lading the debris into a busted wheelbarrow and then horsing the ‘barrow up a step, down a step, around the house and out to the trailer spotted in the drive.

You never, ever want to do this.

In an attempt to prove how strong I have become here at Eastfield bootcamp, both to myself and my co-workers, I attempt a dead left of one of the anvil-sized chunks.

I feel and hear the fibres of my right bicep ripping.

Not good.

Marcos and Raymundo kindly put on my baseboard removal, which a guy with one arm can do, but it was too much.  I was in a modest form of shock and when we broke for luncha, I realized that I must get home, recline and ice the injury, even though it meant losing three hours pay.

And so I did, consumed with fears of being sacked for being careless, weak and too old, and not knowing at all how serious the biceps tear was.

VIERCOLES –

0615, I’m going to the job site even if I have to tape my right arm to my chest, come what may.  The arm isn’t good for anything, but maybe I can pull staples.

Marcos and Raymundo are very kind and do indeed allot me to extracting the 3,457 inch and a half long staples from the former subfloor in the guest wing bath.  This takes me 3 hours.

Meanwhile, they are excavating the rubble from the ‘crete down 18.”

The Boss Man shows with the paychecks and asks if I’m feeling better.  Obviously my absence was noted, which I hoped it was not; and he tells me not to push it too far.

Afternoon: more staple removal for One Armed Johnson while the real Mexicans are upstairs ripping out even more walls.

SABADO  –

Host two tours at PBL, they go okay.  End of the second earn the best complement yet, guy slips me a Twenty.

Evening – chaotic, winter-like clouds.  Could there be weather?  Drops, sporadic spittle from the sky.  Wonderful.

And a postscript about my amigos on the demo job, Raymundo and Marcos: they are both competent, consciencious, diligent and hardworking.  I strive to live up to their example.

This glove was new Monday morning.