What is the best music to listen to while smashing out masonry walls with a sledgehammer? For us, last weekend, this question led to a series of jokes (Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, etc.) and eventually, grabbing a few CDs and heading down to the first floor to begin demolition.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Farrell and I are in the process of renovating an old house in Philadelphia. In its former life, the house was a private social club and meeting place for the Veteran Boxer’s Association. The first floor was the bar where all the alcoholic wayward boxers used to hang out. (Imagine the below scene with fluourescent lighting from a low ceiling, no windows and wood panelling throughout — and no wine glasses of course: This was a beer-and-whiskey establishment):

This weekend, we got down and dirty, first removing all drywall from the room previously known as the ladies’ room (complete with a Miller Light poster of a scantily clad babe with boxing gloves on). This is what the room looked like when we started:

That’s me, holding William while unscrewing the door from its hinges. Don’t worry — for the really messy part he was upstairs with my mom, who was kind enough to come up for the weekend and step in as the resident baby-wrangler.

After removing drywall (an amazingly satisfying task, btw) the room looked more like this:

There is a crazy, scary tool with a fourteen-inch blade called a masonry or cement saw that we used to cut through the wall in two places, opening doorways to the room from either side. The saw is like a chainsaw in that it runs on gasoline and has a pullstart and a choke. The use of said saw caused an incredible amount of cement dust to infiltrate our entire house. It took several attempts to even get a photo that was readable, because there were so many dust fragments in the air that the light from the flash just refracted off of them. This is the best I could do:

Then, in a frenzy fueled by beer and 80s LA punk, we spent several hours smashing through cinderblocks with a sledgehammer:

Ok, fine. We had one beer each. But we were listening to X, really loud. For the record, I was also participating in the manual labor phase of this project. I just stopped for a few minutes every now and then to document the progress.

This is the pile of crap that we neatly stacked after the demolition. You can see the side of the old piano from VBA social club days sitting beneath ancient fiberglass insulation in the center of the photo.

That’s not a building in Mosul, that’s the room we uncovered!

When I was 13 my mom bought a house, and prior to moving us into it, she hired workers to take on a nearly year-long renovation process. The house, built in the mid eighteen-hundreds, served as a hospital during the Civil War and then housed several generations of the same family for all the years up until my mom’s purchase in the early eighties. During the renovation, the workers unearthed a trove of fascinating objects that told the story of the house and its former occupants. There were dozens of bottles stashed behind the plaster, presumably from someone trying to hide a habit. We imagined someone drinking bourbon in the attic, allowing the emptied bottles to fall into the cracks between the walls. There were also newspapers, lots of them, with dates into the early 1900s, and children’s story books, and photographs, and coins.

Sadly, there were no such treasures as we dug into the walls of this old house. But it was a surprisingly nostalgic exercise despite that. Seeing those old brick walls for the first time in decades and pouring our sweat and intention into the hard work to get there left both of us with a sense of communion with this old place. I don’t know if we will ever know any better than we do now the story of this house — who was conceived here, who was born here, who died here, or how those stories unfolded. But there is something beautiful and poetic about opening those spaces again, and allowing light to spill into places that have been dark for so long.