Demo first full day

So here's the start of a pretty full day of work on the demolition, with some time taken to figure out how to deal with the phone / cable lines.  There's some interesting "sequence-y" stuff that you have to go through to avoid getting ahead of yourself or doing something stupid / dangerous.

These two lines were being pulled almost piano-wire-taut by some oak branches, so before I could do anything I had to get out the pole saw and free them up. 

This is a little difficult to see, but there's a wire I've attached with a big screw-eye that's supporting both cables.  One of the wires was actually on the wrong side of the joist so I had to saw and support the joist, a semi-tricky move.  My low plank set-up was handy in sawzalling the other joists down the line.

Here's the view from underneath, a little later.  I left the posts standing because I didn't want to have the remaining section get too wobbly without any lateral support.  I was ready to add a brace if I felt shakiness but I didn't need to.

After my experience last summer (barn-door-ing on a piece of plywood down through bare joists and laying open my shin) I was, shall we say, a bit more careful today as things got narrow. 

Here's how I left things, and you can see the slightly more open wire path in the oak tree in the distance.

As I was cleaning up and stacking non-recyclable / non-burnable wood to be taken to the dump, I was appreciative of just how decayed the wood was in a lot of places.  This chunk was where the cables were attached (the plastic clips are in the center) and there really wasn't much sound wood in there. 

This'll take a bit of work to deal with tomorrow.  This is the stairway light, with what I think is the switch run heading down the post, underneath the mud stairs and up onto a stair rail post.  It's probably a three-way switch so there'll be an extra wire to label and re-set once we build the new stairs.  There may be a way to keep this post as a utility pole during construction but there's a lot of conduit hanging up there.

Muggs will be heading up tomorrow, and I am pretty optimistic that he will be laying out column base excavations and getting ready to start pouring concrete after another day of demo.  Then while he is doing that I will attack the pile of redwood I've schlepped up to the badminton court, de-nailing it and turning it into a stack ready for milling.  Some of that wood is in good shape, but a good bit of it is probably too weathered and brittle to re-use for deck boards.