The Great Room

The house is an old duplex…when I say old, it was built in ‘47. When it originally was converted to a house only a simple mandoor was cut between the back facing living rooms. Made the house very dark and the rooms rather small.

This was not a suprise, I knew the wall was made out of cinderblock and would take some time and effort to remove. The first step of this part of the project was to try to feed the old electrical wires back up to the attic. The wires I couldn’t remove had to be cut and capped.

I started removing the block starting at the edge of the former mandoor. I took a simplistic approach and would knock out a bottom block. It was then a simple matter to put a chisel into a mortar line higher up and allow gravity to seperate a block out for me. Worked fairly well except for the few ocasions several blocks would release at the same time. Broke my thumb thinking I was gonna be holding one block when five came free and I had a wee bit trouble holding on :/

Took the whole weekend but I finally got 16′ of the cinderblock wall down. I had to slap up some temporary cribs until I can build the new header beam. There were a few anchor bolts cemented into the top block and it probably was comical to see me swinging a mini sledge at them trying to free them.