A busy morning of cleaning up and repairing.
Firstly I shifted the piles of bits of wall out of the room I've been working on. The bags of rubble went to be with the others, then a couple of bags of smaller pieces of drywall went to join them. There were enough larger pieces that I didn't fancy endless trips up and down stairs, kicking the cat out of the way at least once with each trip, so I shut him in the kitchen while I got a tarp in place, weighted down, marked so anyone coming onto the driveway would know of the hazard, then dumped it out of the window onto the tarp. Once it was all out of the way I went down to the tarp and cleared it all away. So now my driveway is free of obstructions once more.
Next I ran the shop vac over as much of the floor as I could sensibly get at (which was a lot more than before I shifted the debris out of the way). The floor has changed from being a general gray color to being the brown of the wood floor, with a few gray patches where I've trodden dust into the wood. The wood floor is in a really bad shape so I'm expecting to replace all of it as part of the renovation.
Then I set about fixing up the numerous gaps in the mortar in the wall. This wall is the worst I've seen so far. It's structurally sound - I'm not worried about my house falling down around me - but the number of gaps in the mortar is remarkable. Gaps around the window, gaps right through the brickwork, and a lot of them. I even found one half brick (that had been cut when the house was extended) that wasn't securely fixed to anything. I could literally wobble the inner face of it, and see the outer face of it wobble too. So that is going to take a bit of attention to address. Thankfully it's high enough that it's under the roof canopy and rain won't get at it unless the wind is blowing quite hard, but I was surprised to see such a nasty piece of brickwork.
I found that one of the air gaps right through to the outside looks like it's simply perished caulking around a window. I can fix that from inside, then fill the space behind it with building foam and fiberglass to keep the cold air out.
Hopefully this afternoon I can get most of the rest of this wall fixed up, and maybe make a start on the adjacent wall. Then I need to decide whether to work with the studs I've got there (not in great shape, but operational), or to remove them and reframe the entire wall. I'm leaning towards a total reframe - at least that way I'll know everything is straight and spaces between the studs are as they should be. It's curious to find a space slightly over four feet wide with only a single stud, not quite in the middle of it.
