Day 17: No more awful ceiling

So the last week has seen a few steps toward getting things done in Farwell Manor. Met with a few more bathroom contractors, some decidedly better than others. One guy told us that our 50 square foot bathroom renovation (update vanity, new toilet, add shower head, tile) couldn't be done for less than $17,000. Ri-dic-u-lous.

We also decided on an electrician. Not much competition on the field though. The first guy we took through was thorough and does about 95% of his annual workload updating the wiring in old homes. The next guy seemed genuinely afraid of the amount of work involved. Not for sure but it seemed like the third guy's wife (also admin end of their outfit) vetoed the job because she was afraid of our insulation. The last guy said it would cost more than one and a half times as much as the first.

Then came the weekend. Goal was to completely de-ceiling the basement. This was a priority for a few reasons: it blocked all sight of the electrical which would have ballooned our re-wire costs; we couldn't see any plumbing to know if that needed work (it does but nothing urgent beyond the galvanized to the bathroom, which we knew already); we couldn't see any of our headers to know what insulation they might have; and, it was all downright unsightly. So, with a last bit of cleanup to finish, we managed to get it all down.

The utility room was finished earlier so that helped. What didn't help was that, in the laundry room, the newest plumbing and electrical was all tacked on to the underside of the 1/2" paperboard that made up the ceiling. This meant that we needed to un-tack it all, remove a bunch of the ceiling, tack it up again (to the joists this time) and then move to the next section. The den was little kinder, 16" square 1/4" plywood was tiled over the entire ceiling (followed by the same 1/2" paperboard). Only a couple florescent lights that needed to come down and go back up in this room though. Finally the cold room went quite easily, a double layer of the paperboard meant it held together a lot better and came down in the 16"x48" tiles that they were originally.

After it was all down we set to work on the cleanup that we'd left behind as we did the den. The coldroom then became Casa del Arbro. Evonne set up an extremely complicated wood sortation system and may have named a few of the categories.

Casa del Arbro	"Chunkies" on the left. "Bitties" on the right.

And so, our basement ceiling is now in various piles. Or, put another way, it has been transformed into a new urban chic exposed joist type ceiling. We also can now see the rather extensive knob and tube system feeding basically the entire main and second floors. We arn't just keeping the wood either, all the other random fasteners, hardware and random bits of may be useful things end up in the resource management centre (which also happens to provide easy access for various tools).

Goodbye crumbly green ceiling!	Hello exposed joists!
Looking straight up at the knob and tube ceiling.	The view along a joist.

Resource Management Centre.

We also now have to decide what to do about our headers. Some of them are exposed and are draftier than a kilt. Others have a few bricks in them and are covered in plaster. Do we tear out the brick and insulate them all properly or do we just do the exposed ones? Anyone have advice on header insulation?

Empty header.	Header full of brick and plaster.