Was going to take it easy today but then figured my house isn't going to break itself. Today's task was trying to remove a baseboard. Removing a baseboard is an easy process if it's been fitted as you'd expect. If a new floor is fitted against the baseboard it becomes a lot harder. So I pried the top away from the wall, ran a sawzall along behind it to cut all the nails holding it in place. Then I could pry it further off the wall, pry the laths out from behind it and lift out as much of the plaster as I could. Then my trusty shop vac helped suck out the dust and the pieces I couldn't easily reach, and one of my nail extractors was a good size to scrape the plaster away from the nails at the bottom of the baseboard. With the plaster scraped away it turned to dust, which the shop vac made short work of. And then a nice new metal cutting blade for my oscillating tool made short work of the nails.
Previously I'd been trying to use a blade that turned out to be designed for nail-embedded wood, which didn't last very long. Small wonder - it's designed for cutting wood that might have a nail in it, not for cutting one nail after another. Anyway, now the baseboard is lifted out undamaged, the laths are removed, I've got another 50lb of plaster debris in my polypropylene bags and, most importantly, I've got a clear view of almost the entirety of an exterior wall. Now I can spray foam behind the studs, fill the spaces between the studs with insulation panels (finally shifting some more of the things that have sat there since January) and get moving forward again. I'm going to cut shims from a piece of 2x4 to put in the space under the baseboard, so if I need to remove it again I can just prise it off the wall. I'll be attaching it with small nails rather than the biggest nails I can find, which will also make life easier.
The page wouldn't fully load to let me do anything! It's all good now.
