November 6, 2004

We had a perfect late fall day today, clear blue skies, light wind, and highs in the 60's. So I made good use of it by getting started early on the old shop project. The first project was to break up all the concrete block I knocked loose on Thursday night and haul them off to the rubble pile. It was heavy work but it went along quickly. The next project was to knock down the chimney and the brick wall in the shop. I started at the top of the chimney with a 2-pound short handled hammer and worked row by row down to the roof line. I was surprised to find some charred sheathing at the roof line, an indication that the mortor joints had cracked letting the hot fire out, I am lucky it was only light charring and that it did not turn into a fire.

The picture below shows the brick wall and the stub of the chimney from inside the shop. My orginal plan was to knock the lower concrete shelf down and hope that the wall would fall since this was all that supported the wall. But I thought better of it as I did not want to end up with an injury or damage to the old shop as it fell. So I removed the remianing chimney stub while standing on a ladder, then knocked down the concrete shelf that the chimney rested upon.

Then I started knocking row by row off the wall and in less than an hour had the entire wall removed. Like the chimney demolition, the clean-up took longer than the actual demolition. But as you can see below, the entire firewall has been removed and cleaned up.

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