French renovations, day 17: Wall & ceiling demolition!

And the walls came tumbling down... 

So much dust everywhere. 

First order of business: knocking down the small interior wall (cloison). It is made of 4" thick plaster (10 cm). I'm imagining all the work it took to build the walls: all the bags of plaster, all of the mixing and mudding. And we smashed it to pieces in about 30 minutes! 

We had to bag part of the mound of debris to clear space for the scaffolding. Then we finished the top half of the wall. 

Eric went upstairs to get lunch on for Zari and Dio. I stayed and demolished almost half of the ceiling. 

We have an enormous pile of debris to clean up...and we haven't even taken down the big dividing wall yet! But that will be next week or later, once we have a structural engineer come and look at the beams. (I think they're fine: the ends aren't rotted, and the wall was not load-bearing when it was built in the 1960s. You can even see a gap between one of the beams and the top of the wall.) 

Even though we had the door closed, there was a small crack above one of the windows that opens into the staircase. Eric said there were plumes of dust blowing into the staircase. So after I finished, Eric and I swept and washed down the stairs and railings. I'm going to cover any cracks with plastic or tape so we don't have to do that again tomorrow! 

We had about 1 1/2 hours of glorious peace and quiet before the kids came home. We snuck in a little power nap 🙂 

Dinner was salad (mâche, hardboiled eggs, tomatoes) and "tuna truc," a pasta salad with tuna, corn, red bell peppers in a creamy mustard sauce. 

Tomorrow will be cleaning & bagging the debris, then hopefully the rest of the ceiling demolition.