Demo Part 1: The Dirtiest Treasure Hunt Ever…(So Much Raccoon Poop!)

Demo
Interior demo was a massive five-day undertaking. There’s so much to share that I’m going to divide it over several posts. Gramp took time off of his regular 50 hours a week plus job to do a lot of the heavy lifting on this part of the project. I came prepared to follow Gramp’s lead with my shiny new bump hat in place!

The Attack Plan: 
-Clear the floor (floor where are you???)
-Take down the drop ceiling in the original building (each panel had about three inches of raccoon poop on the top of it, think about that for a second)
-Take out the press board interior walls of the original building
-Remove the two toilets
-Remove debris from the small attic in the addition
-Demo the partition walls in the addition
-Demo the drop ceiling in the addition
-Shore up as many large holes as possible to prevent more critter house guests

Thursday & Friday
Demo started bright and early Thursday morning at the Tefft/Schultz household with Philip Schultz projectile vomiting at 1am. So I started my day off painted in puke and spent the next five days shoveling and sweeping raccoon poop. I’ve never seen or talked about poop so much in my life (and I hope never to again). Here’s how it went:

Me: “Eeew raccoon poop” “So much poop” “Don’t touch that it had poop on it” “Don’t go in the dumpster there’s poop in there” “no REALLY don’t touch that there’s poop on that” “MORE poop!”

Gramp: “It’s mostly desiccated.”

Thursday morning the dumpster arrived and we got to work removing the larger pieces of debris and then started shoveling and carting loads to the dumpster.  Neighbors tell us that at one point all the desks were still in place and the school house looked as if it was ready for children to walk in. It certainly wasn’t like that when we opened the door. All that was left were a couple of broken desks, some rusty pieces of lamps, and piles of papers that were decaying and mixed in with dirt and poop. There were so many pieces of paper on the floor including student health records, teacher test scores and a few vintage posters. All of them were in some state of decay. We saved as much as we could, but it is all so dirty.  We’ll be sharing more of these finds with you all in a later post.

Friday we continued to clear the floor, which took most of the day. I made best friends with my dust mask. Then we tackled the chimney. The old chimney was gone but when you looked up you could see some of the bricks were still left. Gramp got on the ladder and handed down the loose ones so that when we started banging around they wouldn’t fall on us. Gramp on a ladder (especially with bricks, means hard hat on for Jill). We were all prepped to start taking down the drop ceiling (full of poop) Saturday morning.

 

Up Next 
So far just Gramp and I were on the project, then Saturday came and a small army jumped into action! Here’s a preview: