Demo Has Started!

While we were gone on Friday, the contractors started demo of the main house. In a day they demolished the kitchen and the back room and started on the box. They took all the tiles off the roof to save them for one of the porch roofs (either on the casita or on the back of the house.) A picture is worth 1,000 words, so here are a couple of them to show the devastation.





Our contractor sure doesn't believe in nepotism -- he's got his son working for him, but Matt doesn't get the easy jobs. When they started demo, there was no dumpster on site, so for the past two days Matt has been loading the dumpster with all the stuff in the picture below as well as all the stuff that accumulated over the past few days.



Also, I have been worried about the condition of the walls in the back bedroom. I was mostly worried about termites, but it seems instead that I should have been worried about water damage. The exterior wall by the patio is completely rotten. If you scrape it with your finger, the plywood just crumbles, as you can see in the picture below. The black stuff is the back of the felt paper under the stucco -- the sheathing has completely disintegrated. The good news is that the exterior wall closest to the property line, which we can't rebuild, is in good shape. It has redwood siding on it instead of plywood. We might have some termites up in the box, but if we take it off and there aren't any in the wood below, we might be able to avoid tenting the house.