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March 25, 2004

Less Tires, Stumps, Walls

A neighborhood clean-up; a service is provided; more walls come down.

Click on almost any picture below to view larger.


Floor plans for downstairs, with arrows
to the walls that are no longer with us.


Where the pocket doors used to be.
Everything to left of the end of the floor molding was pulled down.


A fake wall.


Debris from the dismantling.


Where the pocket doors will go; where the hallway wall was.

The Cleanup

As new members of the New Vision Civic League of East End, we volunteered on the warm Saturday last week as part of the City of Richmond/Verizon SuperCity Clean-Up Olympics.

We initially worked on the alley between 19th and 20th and Fairmont and R Streets, picking up litter and discarded furniture and stuff. There is at least 1 abandoned house backing up to this alley, and it is right on the Mosby Court South housing projects. It is not an area that we would usually feel comfortable going into... It was a neat experience, and one of the yards had a few chickens in it.

After that alley had been detailed, we moved across 19th into an alley that directly borders the projects. Again, not an area that we would usually feel comfortable going into. We picked up 1,000,000 potato chip bags, a few crutches, a handful of syringes, and one pistol (that turned out to be a BB gun)(but looked larger, I swear)(huge, really)(anyway...).

After 1 and 1/2 alleys, we were exhausted and tired of bending over, so we went cruising the alleys in our area for tires. In maybe 20 blocks of alley, we found 30+ tires. Too bad for the mosquitoes... We brought home an old metal chair and a foot stool, and we located an abondoned rocker/glider that we're still scheming on how to recover w/out getting in trouble.

Trees/Stumps Removed

Our yard has existed as a non-landscaped area for long enough to have developed a serious weed-tree problem. I'd cut down some of the smaller ones, but there were a few 30-40 foot trees out back leaning at close to a 45 degree angle along the alley. These ugly trees were a threat to the phone lines, neighbors' fences, and good taste. So we had CS Flournoy Inc come in and cut'em down, and also pull up stumps remaining from our earlier landscaping efforts, and also strip up a bunch of branches that were touching the house. Things are that much more intentional looking around the yard right now, even with a scattering of large holes and giant pile of drywall and plaster debris.

Removing A Wall

Some jackass split this house into a duplex somewhere along the way. When they did this, they put up 4 walls to divide and maximize the space. We've pulled down two of these walls -- the one blocking the arch in the front room upstairs (scroll down), and the one along the stairway upstairs (scroll down).

Continuing in the phase where we turn the downstairs into an empty shell, we pulled down another of the added walls this past weekend, this time the wall that carved a hallway out of the two front rooms downstairs (and lost the pocket doors). As you can see in the floor plans, this wall turned the downstairs into a 2-bedroom apartment, but also blocked off a great deal of light. With the wall down, we now effectively have a room with 7 windows, and it is possible to see from one end of the downstairs to other straight the length of the house. We also have a huge pile of drywall/plaster/2x4 debris in the yard that needs to be dealt with before it rains again.

The pictures do not do any justice to change in the feel of this space. This was one of those revelatory changes, a real high-water moment in our work so far.

Posted by john m at March 25, 2004 9:55 AM

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