La Casita Labors

Yes, we have once again flung (flinged?) ourselves into the joyous and dirty labor of renovating the old adobe house next door. By which I mean we did some more cleaning and covered ourselves in filth.

When we last left our intrepid house-rehabber (that's A.), he and his short assistants had done some spectacular and very satisfying demolition. Leaving a spectacular and not-so-satisfying mess.

That mess sat there for, um, three months.

We're working in fits and starts, okay? Although I'm not sure which are the fits and which are the starts.

Anyway.

A. happened to have his trailer still hitched up from bringing sheep to auction, so the day before a Dump Day (which are Wednesdays, Fridays, and some Saturdays here), I suggested that he drive the trailer around to the casita and we could all go over there to help him load it with detritus.

So he did. And we filled it.

This trailer sure was a useful purchase.

All of this stuff came from the middle section of the house where we tore the dividing wall out.

Looks better than the last time I took a photo of this area.

Karen. asked me last time I posted about this what the layout of the house is like, and I never answered. Sorry, Karen. But I'll answer now! 

So in the above photo, I was standing in the exterior door leading into what used to be the two rooms we combined by tearing out the wall. Not sure what they were used for when the last occupants lived there, but that very first room is one of the original two rooms of the adobe. The other original room is a bedroom, the doorway of which is not visible in the photo, but is to the left of where I was standing.

So the original house was only two rooms. And there were probably like eight kids in the family. 

And there I was, complaining about one kid in four rooms.

Okay, back to our descriptive house layout tour . . .

In the next room up, on the other side of the wall we took down, are two doors on either side leading to added bedrooms.

Through that door straight ahead you can see in the photo is the kitchen. To the left in the kitchen is a door leading to a living room, which in turn leads to the only bathroom. To the right of the kitchen is another exterior door leading to the enclosed porch that houses the rabbits.

I hope that those details are enough to enable you to visualize the layout, because I would certainly not be a good candidate for drawing it. Although . . . I could have Cubby draw it. Maybe I will.

Anyway again.

It wouldn't be a workday at the casita is there wasn't at least a little bit of violent destruction. So we let the children pound at the terrible combination of concrete, nails, and chicken wire that A. pulled down from the exterior walls. I was hoping they would be able to break up the concrete enough that we could dispose of the chicken wire.

Despite their enthusiastic pounding, the concrete remained stubbornly stuck to the chicken wire. Boo.

A. spent some time chiseling the old plaster off the adobe walls in preparation for repairing them and re-plastering.

Tedious, but necessary.

Luckily, that is a job he can delegate to his least-junior assistant, as it is neither particularly dangerous nor difficult. So now Cubby has a summer job. For which he will get paid nothing but the satisfying knowledge that he is contributing to a worthwhile project. Ahem.

So that's where we are with la casita at the moment. I'm not sure what the next stage will be, but you can be sure I will document it. It seems to be a tradition now.

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.

House Progress . . . and Rabbits

 

So! When we last left our intrepid house-rehabber, he had pulled down the ceilings and was slowly and arduously wheelbarrowing the detritus into the dumpster parked outside the house. He also continued removing paneling from the walls to expose the original stone or plaster, revealing all the many colors the house was painted inside at one point.

He definitely filled that dumpster, which was picked up last week, but he did not quite finish the clean-up. Even absent that handy dumpster, however, the work must go on, so he started filling trash cans and old feed tubs for transport to the dump.

There are still a couple of rooms that need to be cleaned up, but it's beginning to look more like a house that can be worked on, rather than a house that should just be razed.

It's a long time before we will be inhabiting this house, but we've moved in some new tenants in the meantime.

Hasenpfeffer!

We have, in the past, discussed getting meat rabbits, but I'm always reluctant to add yet more animals to our menagerie. Unlike A. and the children, who want allll the animals. 

However, when our neighbor asked us if we would like to take his granddaughter's 4-H meat rabbits--she's no longer doing 4-H, and he's a cattle rancher, not a rabbit-fancier--I couldn't really say no. He wouldn't even take any money for the rabbits. Or the home-built hutch he insisted we take, as well. Or the half-full bag of rabbit food he likewise bestowed upon us.

So now we have six meat rabbits. Two bucks, and four does. 

Our neighbor had them all in the hutch, but we felt bad having them in such a small enclosure.

Jasper sat here by the hutch for HOURS the day we brought the rabbits home. He wasn't the least aggressive, interestingly, he just appeared fascinated. Maybe he thought they needed herding.

Rabbits can actually be somewhat difficult to keep in, due to their habits of digging and gnawing. That's why we put them on the concrete porch of the casita next door. No rabbit is gnawing or digging out of a concrete-floored room with concrete walls. 

We were originally going to separate the bucks with two does each by having the white ones in the casita and the brown ones in the hutch, but we decided instead to put a divider down the center of the casita porch so the brown ones have more room, too. A. is going to do that today.

We might have to use the hutch to separate the bucks after the does have babies, because we're not sure how aggressive and problematic the bucks might become with the young. To be honest, we're not sure about anything, because we've never had rabbits before.

We'll learn, though. And isn't that what life is all about? Growing and learning every day?

Right. Or something.

Down Come the Ceilings

 

When we last left our intrepid house rehabber (is that a word?), he had ripped out a lot of nasty old carpet and some wall paneling, and was steeling himself to pull down ceilings.

There is no way to pull down a ceiling that does not result in a literal rain of filth on top of the puller's head. He got it done, though.

He found some cool stuff while he was doing the demo. Like the original adobe bricks under the plaster in one room:

Circa approximately 1920 he thinks, although it's hard to tell here because adobe building has been in use here for so long and was still used until not long ago.

The house appears to have begun life as a two-room adobe, and then was added on to at different times over the years with different materials. Some walls are stone, some are cinder block, some are more modern two-by-fours. It's an interesting example of the history of the building materials in this area.

The fun (fun?) part over, A. then began the tedious process of shoveling three feet of detritus off the floor and wheelbarrowing it into the dumpster.

He's still working on that. And the dumpster is filling up fast.

Stay tuned for the next installment! Which will probably be A. fixing some of the big cracks in the stone walls. Or maybe gutting the kitchen of the nasty old cabinets, if there's room in the dumpster.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles

 

I'm sure you're familiar with that profound little nugget of wisdom: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

If you aren't familiar with it, now you are. You're welcome! Also, I looked it up to see where it came from, and it's attributed to a (possibly apocryphal) Chinese philospher. 

So there's that.

The particular long journey we're going to talk about now began over a year ago when we bought the abandoned house next door. We only bought it because we didn't want anyone to move in right next door to us. We're real friendly like that.

A. had thought he might someday fix the house up, because it's a hand built adobe and stone house and A. is a self-taught stone mason, but it wasn't high on the list of priorities. 

Cleaning the house out, however, sort of was.

The house had last been lived in by an elderly man who moved out to live with his granddaughter, and quite a lot of the contents of the house were still in there. 

It was a little creepy, to be honest, what with the man's clothes hanging in the closets and personal things like poetry written by the granddaughter still on the walls of her bedroom. It was also disgusting, because all the old blankets and things had made very cozy nests for rodents. 

The kids always wanted to go over there, and they always wanted to take something out to bring home here, and honestly, it was gross and a pain. So we needed to clear it out.

FINALLY, last week, I rented a dumpster.

Here's that very first single step.

It looks like a big dumpster, I know. It is a big dumpster. There was a lot of get rid of.

Last Thursday, A. and I just dove in. 

We began with the detritus in the rooms. Clothing, papers, stuffed animals, blankets, particle-board furniture . . . 

Well. Why don't I let the photos tell that story?

Living room.

Bathroom.

Kitchen (the least cluttered room in the house).

One of the three bedrooms.

It was so gross to be touching all that stuff. My face was set in a permanent expression of disgust the entire time. 

But that was nothing to what came next, as A. started tearing out all the old carpet.

Good thing everyone has plenty of face masks around all the time now.

Getting rid of the carpets made an immediate improvement, because there are few things more filthy than 50-year-old carpeting.

That same bedroom, minus the appalling pink carpet.

The dumpster was filling up rapidly.

We are definitely going to fill this.

A. was on a roll--and also curious to see the actual structure of the house--so he then started pulling off wall paneling. It was the same kind of cheap particle board paneling that was on the walls of the living room in our current house when we bought it. And underneath, we found the same kind of perfectly acceptable walls that definitely did not need to be covered up with that nasty stuff.

In the case of the kitchen, there were actually two layers of paneling.

Right to left: The top layer of horrible grayish paneling, the middle layer of horrible brownish paneling, and the actual wall that was painted an appealingly cheerful yellow.

A. had to stop at this point, because he was exhausted from pulling up and hauling heavy carpets. But the demo was only beginning. 

Stay tuned for when the ceilings came down. Literally.