Days 2 and 3: Ceilings come down

Our old kitchen had a wealth of ceilings!  It turns out that we had not two ceilings, not three ceilings, but four ceilings stuck up there.  Every previous kitchen remodel had just covered up whatever was there before.  No wonder we couldn't plug up the air leaks.

Now all the ceilings have come down and we're almost down to the rafters and studs.  Slowly it is being revealed how the extension on the house was built.

It looks like when the roof extension was put on, they just sawed a hole in the side of the house, leaving the load-bearing studs hanging (and leaving some of the original siding, which can be seen as the white painted boards in the upper right behind the big copper pipe).  Then they stuck the beam in to support the load of the main roof above.

However, when they (whoever cut the hole in the house in the 1960s) put the beam in they must have seen how all the studs had been cut off at uneven lengths, because they then used a variety of scraps as questionable shims to put the load-bearing studs in contact with the beam that's supposed to support the load.  In the center you can see a stud supported by a scrap of 1x2 and then one of the old white painted shingles that formed the original siding of the house.  Some of the load-bearing studs are just hanging in space.  Not good.  As Mike, the lead carpenter, was looking at this, he said "This part is going to need a lot of TLC."  By the way, that gap in the middle of the picture is where all the cold winter air had been freely flowing into our house and distributing itself among all the various gaps between the ceilings.

One thing I found amusing was this 4x4 post that holds up one end of the beam, right where the original house meets the addition.  It has strange gouges in it, all facing the same direction.  It looks like what happened is that when they were about to put the wallboard on after building the addition, they realized that the post was sticking out so the wallboard wouldn't go on flat, and then someone took a hatchet to the side of the post until enough of it was hacked away that they could put the walls on straight.

By the end of Day 3, the first dumpster was filled to capacity with all of those ceilings, the old countertops, the cabinetry parts that couldn't be reused, and some of the walls.  This dumpster has everything... including the kitchen sink.