![]() ![]() As I took my clothes off for the doctor to inspect my skin, he gasped. That summer, I had a regular checkup with my dermatologist. The lady working behind the counter followed me around the store, worried that I was going to steal something. I would take a break from shoveling plaster and go to the corner deli for a sandwich and soda, I was skinny, I was dirty, and I always had a broken look in my eyes. People at work started asking if I was OK. However much plaster you carry out, there is always that much more plaster yet to be bagged. Then shovel literally tons of broken plaster into trash bags and haul them into a U-Haul box truck outside. Do that over and over and over - the ceiling, too - until there is rubble about a foot deep on the floor. It comes off in great boulders of plaster with a thick cloud of dust. You punch a hole in the wall with a hammer, slide a pry bar into the hole, and wrench the plaster off its wooden slats. Removing plaster is a terrible, demoralizing job. In between contractors, I decided that since the house was an empty husk, it would be prudent to tear out all of the old plaster - crumbling for over a century - and replace it with drywall. Peter Crimmins in the midst of destroying the house he had just bought, from within. Dirty, suffocating, and hazardous, removing plaster from the walls and ceiling is ultimately a demoralizing job. ![]() And I came back just as stressed out as when I had left. My wife didn’t get to have much of her husband that vacation. Instead, I was in our motel room, wrangling contractors and putting out fires. About midway through the project, my wife and I decided to take a few days to go to the Jersey Shore, a much-needed vacation. ![]() Juggling contractors is a full-time job, not one to take on while holding down a nine-to-five. In an attempt to control the rebuild, and maybe save some money, I decided not to hire a single project manager but wrangle all the contractors myself.ĭumb idea. ![]() Contractors were hired: concrete guys, then carpenters, then plumbing, electrical, tile, drywall, the whole thing. So we decided the whole back end of the house had to be demolished, a concrete foundation poured, and then a new kitchen built on top. The reason the back corner sloped downward was the lack of anything underneath it. When I got down to the bottom, I discovered a much worse problem: The kitchen did not have a foundation underneath, just stacks of loose bricks in the dirt. Over the years, previous owners had decided to keep putting down new linoleum without taking off the old. The first thing I did was tear up the kitchen flooring. The agent said we were never going to find a better deal for a house on a block this good. She took the real estate agent aside and asked if he had something more modern that would not steal her husband. My wife got scared the house was going to require endless weekends of renovation. When my wife and I looked at a house a few years ago with a real estate agent, we noticed the hideous floor-to-ceiling mirror wall in the living room, the oddly tiny bathroom, and the troubling slope of the kitchen floor. ![]()
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