And now we demo...

So it's official. We are now the proud owners of a 1916 semi-detached home in Montreal's NDG. And now we start phase one...destroy the house.

Last week we started demolishing various walls and doors that need to be cleaned out before we can begin our proper renovations. We've hired a handyman to get in there and strategically strip it down. And me? I'm the cheap labour who comes in to haul garbage. And my weekend mission was to fill this:

By Sunday at 4pm, it was mission accomplished:

One of the key rooms we started in was the kitchen/dining room. We are planning to remove the wall dividing the two rooms but first, everything had to be stripped out. So here's the before:

Kitchen

Dining Room

Kitchen

Kitchen

And the after:

With the help of a couple noble friends, I spent the weekend moving all that junk into the container. As you may recall, our house has a fine set of stairs running up from the road. Yes, a fine set of stairs. They go up. And they go down. And all weekend, I went up. And I went down. By Sunday afternoon, my limbs despised and mocked me, but now the kitchen and dining room looked like this:

We hauled out every door from the house save for three original doors. The upstairs was stripped and cleaned. There's still lots more to strip out. We'll be renting another container in a couple weeks and I'll earn more aches and pains. But it's hard to moan about that when I'm doing it for our own house.