Make Way for the Demo Crew

Exciting news: Work has resumed on the casita!

Okay, so it doesn't sound that exciting, but it was. Because walls came down. And small children were the ones wielding the crowbar.

Lemme back up.

A couple of weeks ago, before our weather took a turn for the Siberian, we had a day that was relatively warm, but hellaciously windy. When the wind is blowing up to 30 miles an hour, outdoor work is unpleasant, to say the least. 

But not working is not something A. is good at. So indoor work it is! And, again, this being A., not indoor work in the sense of cleaning windows or scrubbing floors. No, he needed to destroy some stuff.

Good thing we have that house next door.

He went over there to finish clearing out the mess he made the last time he did demo work on the inside, pulling down the ceilings and so on.  We all went over to inspect the progress--and, in the children's case, run around shrieking and unfettered in an empty house--and then A decided to just "take a look" at the exterior walls, to get a better idea of how they were constructed.

This is the oldest part of the house, which is handmade adobe bricks.

Adobe bricks can't be left exposed, since they are literally just mud and sand and would get destroyed if exposed to the weather. It used to be traditional to put a plaster over the exterior of houses, a job allocated to women that had to be done every single year. 

In this case, the adobes were covered with the original mud plaster, then with nails and chicken wire, and then cement. The chicken wire and nails give the cement something to adhere to, but it makes for a nasty mess when it's pulled off. Which is of course what A. proceeded to do.

He started peeling the cement covering away near the window, then around the corner . . .

Just taking a look, indeed.

And then, quite unexpectedly, as he got around the corner, the weight of all that concrete pulled the entire section of wall covering off to the right of the door.

It was very dramatic.

Next we all went inside that same section of the house, so A. could  "take a look" at how the inside of those walls was constructed.

You see where this is going, don't you?

Adobes with mud plaster, just like the outside. 

And then . . .

We didn't really need this wall, did we?

As it turned out, no, we definitely did not need that wall. It was a very flimsy divider made of two-by-fours and dry wall, and it served no good purpose. So A. started to whack it down. I stopped him, though, and suggested that perhaps he could allow his own small demolition crew to save him some work. 

I mean, they spend their lives trying to destroy things. Why not harness that natural destructiveness to the good for once?

So A. turned over the crowbar and let them go to town. 

Cubby started them off, gleefully sinking the crowbar deep into the drywall and yanking holes in it.

Charlie continued where Cubby left off.

Then Jack.

And finally, that small girl in the purple boots there. You don't think she was going to be left out, do you? Although she needed some assistance with the heavy-duty crowbar.

And so, whack by joyful whack, they took the wall down.

I can't really express to you the scene at this point.

So much noise. So much hysterical joy.

Until eventually, all that remained standing was the door in its frames. A. took over again for this part, until there was nothing left standing.

Although I am generally a big fan of separate rooms and doors--I would never willingly live in an open-plan house--these two rooms were very small, and it's a great improvement to join them.

Now there is yet more clean-up to be done, and then, when the weather finally warms up for good, A. can start fixing walls and actually re-building the house. 

Although that probably won't be nearly as much fun for the children as the demolition has been.