19. How to expose an Internal brick wall

How to expose an Internal brick wall.

So You found this page because you want to learn how to expose an Internal brick wall right? Well, keep on searching. I have NO friggin clue how to! But who cares. You can watch me try!

Beautiful internal brick apartments and houses. It is so New york. Stylish, industrial, pleasing. We love it. So much in fact we are now buying houses in New York as well. Hopefully, we come across these pretty structures!

Getting it done cheap. Expose the Brick!

So first a recap. I bought a row house for 5K. It was in bad shape, but it was $5K. Come on!

I will try to get this project done for as little money as possible. To keep the cost down I will remove the plaster and laths to expose the brick. From the previous entry to this blog I had explained that exposing the brick will save us money on framing,  sheetrock, taping, mudding, and painting (including all the prep work, that comes with these tasks).

As of now, my goal is to get it rented out to section 8.  I am not sure yet if I will actually do that, or rent each room out while I myself will stay there. A bit of a twisted type of “House Hacking“.

The dilemma is as follows. If I were to live there myself, the finishes will be different (of course). But I have some time to decide as all I am doing now is demolition.

So far I have to spend money on some heavy-duty garbage backs, Respirator masks, screwdriver, temp doorknobs, scraping tools, a crowbar, and 2 hammers.

I am still in the demolition phase. I can not get a dumpster as the area is a bit shady. By morning the entire neighborhood would have dumped their mattresses in there filling it up. So I am trying to put it all in bags, and either rent a dumpster for a day and dump it all in there to be hauled off that same day, or find someone on craigslist to take the garbage away.

I tried the latter. Got stiffed, which I don’t want to talk about right now. (just stiffed out of 30 dollars so it is not a big deal, but I am getting really sick and tired of people being dishonest. Soon after I found another willing person to haul the trash away for 100. I bargained to have them help me demo the place and haul it all away for 300. We shook hands… we will see how that works out.

But I am too eager to wait so I started the demo with or without them.

Here is where I am at now.

I started removing the plaster. It is such a mess.

Here are some pointers I learned the hard way. Although it is tempting to smash through the walls with a sledge hammer, it will save you a lot of headaches not doing it. When you do so the plaster will crumble in pieces, and the wooden laths will break in pieces of all sizes all falling to the floor. The mixed wood pieces and the plaster make it extremely difficult to sweep up. I ended up fishing all the wood out first, then scooping up the plaster and put it in bags.

So, Here It is: Exposing Brick

Brick is looking great. And the plaster is not sticking to the brick too much. LUCKY!

I suggest removing the plaster first exposing the laths lie the picture below.

Then ripping the wood off is not only easier,  the laths often come off as whole pieces, making fewer pieces to clean up which saves a lot of time and headache!

The brick seems to be in amazing shape. This is looking really promising!

This is what happens when you just smash through walls with plaster. Wood shatters in a million pieces. I had to shift through all the rubble and separate the wood from the plaster in order to be able to sweep up the plaster. Look at how much wood!

Another funny thing:

When I removed the ceiling plaster I found the other set of spanning beams almost 2 foot higher than the ones the sheetrock was attached to. We can just discard that first layer and hang sheetrock up on the higher second layer! A higher ceiling makes the room feel a lot larger! How cool is that!

By the end of this coming week, I hope to be done with that.

The next step is brick clean up and prepping. After that is sealing. By then the walls should look really nice. Let’s see..

Meanwhile on a different planet.. well more like blog.

I noticed my competitors trying to catch up on me in the google rankings.

And just because you dared THINK it I will unleash my wrath on you!!

So here is what I did. I checked out y’alls pages. And I checked which cities you are gunning for that I have graciously allowed you to take without my interference. But no. Ohh no, you couldn’t be grateful to me for allowing you a space on the first page of google. You had to be greedy!

Well!

I took those cities… and I created city landing pages for my site for those cities! And guess who kicked you off the first page within A DAY!

No no… guess.

Come on.. you can do it, ME! Yes ME damn it.

Are you going to behave now?

Nah I am not really this mean. I just needed a few backlinks to these  2 new pages, and this is an entertaining way to finagle them in there!

😉