Old sunroom demolition

The old sunroom had vertical sliding windows all around and aluminium siding against the walls. The windows were just single pane, but with storm windows on the outside, which made the room barely usable in the winter.

This photo shows early progress of the demolition. I had already stripped some of the paneling out and was starting to take the panels off the ceiling.

Because the inside work didn't result in any unsightliness from the outside, I stretched that out over the course of a week working on it in the evenings.

The rest of these photos were all taken the same Saturday. The sunroom went from looking like it does in the first photo on this page to the pile of kindling in the last photo on this page over the course of one day.

The first thing I did was to remove the windows and strip off all the siding. That left blue painted clapboard, which I guess is how this porch thing originally looked.

A view of the inside, after ripping out the windows and door.

In this photo, I had most of the boards stripped off, including the roof.

I found parts of the wood that had grown rotten because water got under the siding. I also found lots of carpenter ants. The house had always had a slight ant problem, but after I demolished the addition, the ants were magically gone. I guess this is where they all came from.

After I pried all the boards off the roof, it was time to attack the framing. I figured the easiest way to work on the roof framing would be to bring it down to ground level, so I whacked out the posts with a sledgehammer. The roof just sort of hung there without the supports, so I threw a rope over one of the rafters and pulled it down. You can still see the yellow rope hanging from the rafter.

Yanking the roof down like that also solved the problem of how to detach it from the brickwork. All the anchors just pulled cleanly out of the brick. If I had pulled some bricks out in the process, it wouldn't have mattered that much because I was going to cover that wall with the new addition anyway.

This is what was left at the end of the day. The aluminium siding is on the right, all the bits of wood that weren't reusable in the middle, and the flooring scrap on the left.

I pulled all the nails out of the reusable framing members and piled them somewhere else.

All this junk I put onto the curb one week's worth at a time, and some of it I hauled to the dump in my car. My car was already near the end of its useful life at this point, so I didn't mind abusing it like that.

See also: Dismantling / recycling old cottages

Next: New foundation