Before

Well... before I could put up any new tongue-and-groove Cedar, I needed some help getting rid of the old lumber. I couldn't have done it without the help of my mother, either!!!

As much as she might've liked to have just put the Cedar boards right over what was already there, there was just too much junk up there. In the photo above, you can see the painted particle-board that was the celing previously, and you can see just how... elegant it was.

Lovely.

So, I recently was able to anchor a great deal on these Cedar boards (again, thank you to my mother). Trouble is, I didn't want to just put them over the junk that was already there. So... we got to pulling those old boards down...

During

What's that, under there?

To quote the old Barnaked Ladies song: "I just made you say underwear." Well under that gross particle board is some old (and quite rough) tongue-and-groove lumber of an unknown age. It's in pretty rough shape, rotten, dry, and falling apart in a number of places.

Those old boards were quite "fun" to pull, and they led to quite the disaster... Let me introduce you to my history lesson for the weekend.

Oh yes... see all that black powder, covering everything you see? It was covering us, too. You do not want to picture the color of my bathwater... let me just say that.

My mother and I were both a bit stumped by what the powder was, and why it was black... Well, after a bit of brainstorming, and chatting with some other folks who have also renovated some of these older homes in Potlatch, we came upon the most likely answer: Mount St. Helens!

Yep, that's right. We think all that black stuff is ash, just not from the home's chimney, from the biggest chimney the western United States has seen in the last half-century. (Weird to think that 1980 is that far back, isn't it?) From our own homegrown-research, this seems to be the most likely origin of that ash-dust.

Still... Woah.

After

Now with all that nastiness cleaned out, we were able to get the whole porch cleaned up, ready for me to run my new wiring for lights, speakers, and special effects (more on that later). Now... I just need to get all of that done.

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