At the end of the day, I was a little crestfallen looking around to see our accomplishments. It didn't look commensurate with the damage done to both our bodies. I guess it is also the phenomenon of not being able to keep an accurate "before" picture in mind when looking in real time at the "after."
First, Scott removed an enormous slab of concrete with a sledgehammer. The slab used to be under the pump house he took down last weekend. When I say enormous, I mean insanely enormous: insanely thick and insanely heavy. Normal people don't think of touching such things with their bare hands. I felt bad watching him work on it. It took so much effort. Then, after sledging chunks off, he'd load them into a wheelbarrow, cart them down to the river bank, unload them, and arrange them neatly along the shoreline.
First, Scott removed an enormous slab of concrete with a sledgehammer. The slab used to be under the pump house he took down last weekend. When I say enormous, I mean insanely enormous: insanely thick and insanely heavy. Normal people don't think of touching such things with their bare hands. I felt bad watching him work on it. It took so much effort. Then, after sledging chunks off, he'd load them into a wheelbarrow, cart them down to the river bank, unload them, and arrange them neatly along the shoreline.
Before: "Oh, yeah, doesn't look so bad!"
This is how thick it was!
Workin' hard
In progress
Where concrete used to be
Sculpting the river bank
A lot of concrete!!! Each one sledged from the slab, put into the wheelbarrow, taken out of the wheelbarrow, carried to the shore, and arranged nicely.
Second, we finished gutting the bathroom and then removed all the wallboard from the walls and ceiling of the eventual kitchen. While Scott was working on the slab, I started taking the wallboard down after removing the trim and switch plates. Then he came in and did the bathroom, which included smashing a tile wall, a concrete shower pan, and a concrete floor four inches thick.
One side when we started
I don't have any good picture of the bathroom from the outside where you could see the 3-foot wall on the right where the tiled part of the shower was, the 2-foot wall on the right that housed the pocket door, or the pocket door. All I have are these which show the two walls but with no good idea of context or scale.
another view of the corner with a bit of the bathroom behind
Tile wall, looking from inside the bathroom
Bathroom before we did anything
Walls between kitchen and bath gone
Walls gone, shower pan gone, most of concrete floor gone
Looking the other way in the kitchen, at the start of the day
Same view at the end of the day
We kept the fire burning all day, and when we were exhausted and ready to go home, Scott loaded the last of the mattresses on the truck to put in the trash.
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