Demolition, Part I

2006.02.04

I bought some Clorox spray today, with the thought to spray down the mold on the walls and try to kill it off.  I’ve done nothing more than just peek into that room lately, but when I got in there to spray the bleach and really took a good look, I quickly saw that the mold was much more extensive than I’d realized.  Yikes.

I started in the corner closet, where it looked the worst.  After some work with a drywall handsaw and a prying tool, I had the first piece of moldy drywall removed.  Then I got my first glimpse of wood behind the drywall on the other side of that wall.  Hmm.

I went to Harbor Freight and bought their cheap reciprocating saw for $20.  It came with a metal-cutting blade and a wood-cutting blade.  I put the wood blade on, and gave it a try.  Well… it went through the drywall no problem, but once it hit that wood, it just chattered all over the place.  I know it’s a cheap piece of junk, but why is it on This Old House, they can plunge those things right into the wall?  “Like buttah.”  On TV, this saw would cut through drywall, wood studs, nails, cast iron plumbing pipes…

So much for that.  So I went back to the handtools.  After a while, I had most of the drywall pulled off that wall separating the corner closet from the main back room.  At this point, it looked like what I had was quarter-inch-thick drywall (didn’t even know they made it that thin) on top of tongue-and-groove wood siding… probably knotty pine from the looks of it.