Chimney Demolition
The roofers are currently pounding away putting on a new roof (and constantly testing the structural integrity of the house). We had decided that before they started we should kick the chimney removal project up the priority ladder. It was an old chimney for a non existent basement furnace. It ran up through the house taking up space in the kitchen on the 1st floor and going through the middle of a room on the second. So it began.
It started with googling and finding many excellent DIY chimney removal pages. Pretty simple: check for structural support, use lots of plastic and duct tape, start at the top and work your way down. The last one seems painfully obvious but Google led me to a site where someone described the many problems they ran into when they started at the bottom.
The roof was steep and slick from the disintegrating shingles so it wasn't fun working our way over to the chimney. The plan was to take off a brick at a time, hand them to Julie midway along the roof line and she would throw them over the deck into the yard. The first strike of the sledge hammer on the clay top sent chunks accelerating down the roof and springboarding off the gutters into the side of our neighbors house, nearly smashing their window. Bad start. I quickly learned to wield the sledge hammer with safety and precision. After a few rounds of brick handoff and toss, Julie realized she would not be able to continue, so against my better judgment and research I tossed the remaining rows of bricks down the chimney.
On the second floor we taped up plastic and got to work smashing the plaster that surrounded the chimney. Plaster dust is terrible, second only to soot. We did not heed the warnings that we read to use tons of plastic and tape, it will take months to rid the house of all the soot and plaster dust.
The bricks came up with the slightest hit of the hammer. Some of them would come loose by hand. It was easy fast dirty work until the chimney was about waist high on the second floor, that's when we ran into the rubble from tossing bricks into the chimney when we were on the roof. I had no idea that it would fill up so fast. So now it was time to shovel pulverized mortar, brick, and soot. After we passed the 2nd floor's floor the space to work in became so tight that I had to switch from a shovel to a plastic kitchen spoon... this slowed things down.
When there was enough room for me to stand in the hole I fixed the floor from inside locking myself in until I reached freedom in the basement. We did this to avoid putting a massive wound in the kitchen. We made a small hole in the wall so I could hand the bricks and rubble out. It took three hours to ride the chimney the six feet from the kitchen to the basement.
Filthy work. Some advice: Lots of plastic, lots of duct tape, don't throw bricks down the chimney.