When life hands you dust, make...dustimade?

If you haven't seen the pre-cursor to this post, please take a quick moment to view the mother of our child giggle as she begins demolishing the wall in the photo below. All I have to say is: Future boyfriends, I will make you sweat. She will make you understand fear.

So began demolition on the wall separating our living and dining rooms. To give credit where credit is due, I would not have been able to take this project on without the help of three very important "friends." The first (not pictured), is my big brother - engineer extraordinaire. We made short work of this wall together, and he gave me the green-light that we weren't dealing with a load-bearing structure. Which is good, because we want to keep the living room our living room, not suddenly have a living room-bedroom fusion.

Living Room Pre-Demo

The second friend, already spoken of by Jen, is the reciprocating saw (a DeWalt) that I'm wielding below. Also the favored tool of another DIYer who we follow, this thing is amazing. It made short work of the studs and nails in my way and, as Jen was giggling doing her demo, I was man-giggling using this thing.

The third friend, and currently the first-most-used tool in my burgeoning arsenal, is a shop-vac. Now, this may not seem like a particularly manly tool, it is the workhorse of many-a-man's shop and brought some semblance of sanity back to our lives after my brother and I brought a dust-storm down own the house. Lesson learned here: COVER EVERYTHING! We took the wall down on Sunday afternoon (Bro's vac went home with him) and Monday at lunch I was at Sears picking one for myself.

Ooops. Great profile of a starfish, though!

Shop-vac of note on right. Notice all the studs in the room. Only one was left standing at the completion of this project.

The first days of demo taught me a lot about project planning. One - especially if you're working with plaster and lath, seal off the room as best you can. And cover stuff. Or even better yet, get it out. That dust gets everywhere.

Two - have proper dust-masks. For education's sake only, Jen models the OSHA-despised DIY "Tissue Paper Filtration System." My brother and I were thankful for excellent ventilation that day.

Pretty as a flower, my love is.

And three - map out the course of your destruction with a little more care than, "What should we do tomorrow, Pete?" "Why don't we take over the world! bust this wall down?" Include things like a clean-up plan, waste removal thoughts, and always, always map out coffee breaks.

Yet another thing to thank bro for: a killer latte.