Gimme Shelter

I didn't realize that people were thinking Emily and I were toughing it out during the construction by living out of boxes and heating cans of beans over a camping stove with only sheets of plastic to cover up the missing walls.   That's actually pretty far from the truth.  It hasn't always been the most comfortable time but Contractor Larry has gone out of his way to make sure that we can have a semi-normal life as much as possible while the house is being torn down and rebuilt.


Before any walls were removed from the back of the house, they built "demising walls" in the basement, kitchen, dining room, and master bedroom.  The walls are all insulated (unlike the walls that are being torn out) and basically form a new back wall for the entire house that keeps us completely sealed off from what's going on in the backyard.  In the final demo photos I posted the other day, the new-looking plywood walls you see from the outside of the back of the house are all demising walls.

In addition to building demising walls, they also put together a temporary kitchen for us in the old dining room using the counters and cabinets from the original kitchen.  Before we saw this, both Emily and I were thinking we didn't need a temp kitchen at all... we could live on takeout and cereal for a few months.  But it only took them about a day and a half to put it up and we're so glad they did.  To be honest, we like this better than our old kitchen: the overall layout is better, the counters and cabinets are at the correct height, and best of all it's not 35 degrees in there during the winter.  Also, just off of the temp kitchen (in the very front part of where the old kitchen used to be) we now have a little laundry room with cabinets, light, and heating.  Again, such an improvement from the cold and dirty corner of our basement that we used to have for laundry.


This is the demising wall inside the master bedroom.  It starts maybe 4 feet in from the door, a little more than halfway across the upper part of the bedroom.