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"  Right now, in the late middle of my demolition, the dust is everywhere. Plaster dust is probably the worst of all the dusts, because it&amp;#039;s so fine and has almost no weight, which means it hangs in the air for a long time before it finally decides to settle. Hours after I&amp;#039;ve torn down an ancient plaster wall or ceiling, a thick white cloud still hovers over the old pine floors like fog in an ice rink. Plaster dust slips through cracks. It digs tunnels. I&amp;#039;ve found plaster dust deep inside my ears; there&amp;#039;s a small white explosion of it behind the screen on my cell phone, a tiny celestial body, somehow trapped under glass. It doesn&amp;#039;t smell too bad \u2014 not like the black plastic leftovers from a cut-through shitter pipe or the disintegrated newspapers that were shoved into the walls for insulation \u2014 but plaster dust tastes bad, like chalk, and it&amp;#039;s murder on your eyes. I&amp;#039;ll wake up the morning after spending yet another day smashing down my house and little balls of pulp will have worked their way to the corners of my eyes in the night. A couple of weeks ago, I even had to shave my head, because each time I showered, the plaster dust would become a little more like cement rather than wash away. It was as though the plaster dust had made up its mind to take down some of me with it. Next come the tiny flecks of fiberglass from the occasional uncovered pad of pink insulation. They&amp;#039;re nearly as bad as the plaster dust, because they&amp;#039;re nearly as insidious. Old, blown-in cellulose also makes a hell of a mess, but at least its particular brand of smoke-colored dust settles. Cellulose falls to the ground with a thud. In the kitchen ceiling, I somehow tapped into a forgotten pocket of vermiculite \u2014 just a little, maybe enough to fill a shoe box, but its nasty dark-gray dust is terrible for you, and I sprayed it down with water before I vacuumed it up. A few crumbled bricks from the fireplace left behind a pretty red dust that made my future den remind me of a golf course in Georgia. Up in the attic, the ancient tar-paper roof had dissolved and sneaked through the cracks in the wide weathered planks, coating my buddy Phil and me with a fine black powder until we looked like chimney sweeps. Fiberboard from the 1960s leaves behind a brown, bready kind of dust, like crumbs. Copper shavings look like we should use them as currency. Sawdust is probably the least offensive of all the dusts, because it&amp;#039;s easy to clean up and it smells good, like granddads and hamster cages, but in the end, it&amp;#039;s just more dust. It still shows up mysteriously in a room three floors away from where it was made, waiting for me to sweep it up and carry it out to the dumpster. I&amp;#039;ve filled up two thirty-yard dumpsters with dust and its antecedents so far, and I&amp;#039;m halfway through a third. I&amp;#039;ll fill it and probably most of another one before I&amp;#039;m done with the demolition. In the three months since we took possession of our house \u2014 a beautiful Second Empire built in 1870, with an ornate mansard roof and a desperate need for some love \u2014 I&amp;#039;ve carried eighteen thousand pounds of unnecessary shit out of it, mostly by myself. The ceiling in Charley&amp;#039;s future bedroom alone \u2014 acoustic tiles, strapping, plaster, lath, and mountains of that blown-in cellulose \u2014 took me sixty-one trips up and down the stairs. The ceilings in our bedroom, in Sam&amp;#039;s bedroom, and in the upstairs hallway are gone, too. Maybe forty rolls of wallpaper, stripped. Every scrap of carpet, lifted. Most of the attic, gutted. The den. The first-floor powder room. The kitchen. The maid&amp;#039;s room. All of them, vanished.  I&amp;#039;ve learned a lot in the last three months. Most important: Houses are made out of many things, and at their essence, all of those things are dust. This is the second time I&amp;#039;ve tackled an old house. I made too many mistakes with the first one to be happy with it. We lived there seven years, and I never could turn off my brain in that house; I could never stop thinking about what I should have done differently. It became a great unhappy weight on my shoulders, a symbol of everything I&amp;#039;d done wrong. We had to move, or I would have gone crazy. Wherever I stood or sat, my eyes would inevitably fall on some bruise or blemish. Even after they had been erased, I could still see them. I needed to start again. Our first house was a big city house that had been converted into three apartments; we set about converting it back into a house. Unfortunately, all its charm had been stripped out of it over the years, replaced by layers and layers of linoleum and chipboard. I did my best with it, I like to tell myself, but for all sorts of reasons \u2014 time, money, inexperience, the birth of our sons, and the pressures of real life \u2014 that house always felt like a collection of half measures. We were living in it as we renovated it, and that was our biggest mistake. Worst of all, living in the house while we worked on it made us reluctant to demolish anything as completely as we should have. We never once started with a clean slate. We tried to pick around things instead, a nudge here, a jangle there. Tearing something out meant putting something else back in. It also invariably meant there was yet another thing wrong with our already very wrong house, and we were scared of what else we might find. There was always another nasty surprise, another reminder of how far we had left to go, and sometimes it seemed easier not to take anything down in the first place and hope that everything would somehow magically knit itself back together behind the crumbling walls, under the creaky floor. Of course, nothing fixes itself, except for us.  It&amp;#039;s too much if I think about everything I have to fix. It becomes too monumental. Sometimes, late at night, the inevitable list making happens \u2014 new roof, restore the windows (there are thirty-four of them, with wood sashes and rippled glass), plumbing, new electrical (it&amp;#039;s 90 percent knob and tube), new ducts and returns, insulate the attic, refinish the floors, drywall (maybe eighty sheets), plaster, paint, tend to the foot-high trim, new kitchen, new bathrooms (three of them), run natural-gas lines and install two new fireplaces (in addition to the two coal-burning ones we&amp;#039;re keeping), lights and switches, new front door, new garage, landscaping, white picket fence outside, and a Christmas turkey in the oven \u2014 but then I try to shake it all away and concentrate on what I have to do now, what I have to do first: Job one, always, is demolition. Building is about architecture and design. It&amp;#039;s about the surface of things. Demolition is about engineering. It&amp;#039;s about biology and mechanics. It&amp;#039;s about what&amp;#039;s inside. These last three months have been an exercise in truth seeking. This morning, specifically, I have to finish stripping the first-floor hallway down to its frame, down until I uncover hand-forged square-headed nails and timbers that we couldn&amp;#039;t dream of finding anymore. More specifically, I have to pull down this six-foot stretch of plaster-and-lath ceiling between these two gigantic joists. Even more specifically than that, right now, at this very moment, with winter&amp;#039;s first snow falling outside and empty tree branches tapping at the windows, I have to hook this four-foot length of lath with the claw of my hammer and pull it down. A single piece of lath? I can do that. And now the first-floor hallway is about to become so much dust, starting with this doomed piece of lath right here. I can do that.   That was the other big mistake we made the last time around. I hired out a lot of the work. I think, like a lot of people, I was scared of messing up, of losing all that I&amp;#039;d already invested. I believed each tradesman who told me that if I did it myself, with my tender, inexperienced hands, I would only ruin everything. So I paid people to ruin it for me. I was rarely happy with the work of others; they talked much better games than they played. I felt beholden to smirking plumbers and carpenters who billed three hours for every one they worked. It made me feel like less of a man, and I began feeling as though my life weren&amp;#039;t my own anymore. No one cares about your love as much as you do. The second time around, I&amp;#039;d tend to my own love, and I&amp;#039;d be happier for it. I decided that I wanted to become competent. I wanted to become experienced. I wanted to know. I wanted to see broken things and know how to fix them; I wanted to see working things and understand why they worked. Most of all, I wanted to be able to stand in my own house and know, in my heart, that everything was as it should be, because I had made it that way. I didn&amp;#039;t want to have to wonder about what lurked behind the walls, whether paper coffee cups and cigarette butts had been stashed under my bathtub. (That actually happened in our first house.) I didn&amp;#039;t want to have to trust that these strangers and straw dogs had come into my home and fixed it. I wanted to see to it myself. Early on here, during my first gentle forays into our Second Empire, I was pulling down walls in the kitchen. The former owners had told us that they&amp;#039;d paid an electrician to convert the first floor, including the kitchen, from sinister black knob and tube to modern white wires. Knob and tube is dangerous, a fire hazard. It&amp;#039;s bad enough that no one will insure a house with knob and tube. It has to come out. And in the kitchen, when our home inspector pulled off a switch plate or took down a light fixture, sure enough, shiny new wiring poked out. It looked perfect. But then I took down the walls and saw what that electrician had done: He&amp;#039;d simply tied two feet of new wire into the old knob and tube \u2014 fumbling together nasty little splices as far as he could reach up and inside the walls. Not only had he not fixed the wiring, he&amp;#039;d made it more dangerous than it was in the first place \u2014 and then he collected his money off a lovely old couple and walked away, knowing full well that he risked turning their house and everything in it, including them, into ashes before they had a chance to become dust. I swore a lot at the time, but now I&amp;#039;m glad I found those splices. Each one of them, another ugly knot behind the scorched plaster, strengthened my resolve. This time, I&amp;#039;d do it myself, and I&amp;#039;d start the way I should have started the first time around. I&amp;#039;d made up my mind to take everything back to studs. My favorite tool is my reciprocating saw. Sometimes, reciprocating saws are referred to as Sawzalls, but that&amp;#039;s actually a trademark of the Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation. Mine&amp;#039;s a DeWalt. But I did buy a variety pack of Milwaukee blades to snap into it. They have hilarious names like the Ax or the Wrecker or the Torch. I usually go for the Wrecker, which is designed for all-purpose demolition, but sometimes the Ax or the Torch come in handy, because they&amp;#039;re particularly well suited to cutting through wood and metal, respectively. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s better to employ a specialist. When most people think about demolition, blunt instruments come to mind: sledgehammers, steel-toed boots, wrecking balls. I have a sledgehammer, but I&amp;#039;ve used it only once on the house, to take out a resistant bit of framing that needed to be taught a lesson. A local contractor loaned me  a pickax \u2014 a giant thing, not far removed from a Pulaski on the tool family tree \u2014 because he likes using it for tearing down plaster and lath. I haven&amp;#039;t used it. For me, it&amp;#039;s like performing heart surgery with a chain saw. I&amp;#039;d rather claw away with my hammer, a crowbar, and my reciprocating saw. It might take me longer, but it seems less risky to me. Swinging a pickax inside your house seems a lot like swinging a baseball bat inside a locker room. Sooner or later, someone&amp;#039;s going to get hit in the mouth. Demolition can be grunt work, that&amp;#039;s true. But as strange as it might sound, demolition isn&amp;#039;t always about pure destruction. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s about physics and leverage and finesse. In our den, the former owners had covered the walls with that fake wood paneling that was popular when people thought fondue was a great idea. In most places, it popped off pretty easily, lifted from behind with a long crowbar. But sometime after they had put up the paneling, the former owners put a fresh layer of drywall on the ceiling, and the top row of paneling \u2014 and the nails that held it in place along its top edge \u2014 was trapped behind it. I spent an afternoon trying like hell to pry away a single piece of it, and I couldn&amp;#039;t get it down no matter how many times I called it a cunt. I gave up and moved on to other jobs, slowly coming to the grim realization that I was going to have to take down the ceiling if I wanted to take down the walls. Then my father-in-law, Jim, and my brother-in-law Rob came by for an afternoon to give me a hand. I decided we should tackle the den, because I didn&amp;#039;t want to go back in there alone. Rob and I began taking down the plaster and lath where I&amp;#039;d managed to remove the paneling, and Jim began to survey what was left of it, that long course along the ceiling. Jim is a retired firefighter, and the truth about firefighters is, most of them are better at trades than they are at fighting fires. Jim built a terrific house once with the boys from his fire hall \u2014 there were plumbers and electricians and carpenters among them, men who filled their plentiful off days with jobs on the side. Jim picked up tricks from them; he learned how architecture works. Fighting fires in houses and feed silos also colored the way he saw buildings. Fire highlights a structure&amp;#039;s strengths and exposes its weaknesses. There were certain elements that would hold even during an inferno, and there were entire sections that would collapse with the slightest lick of flame or touch from an ax. Jim learned that buildings are built from the bottom up, and that&amp;#039;s how they usually come down, too. He looked at the troublesome paneling for a little while before he even thought to pick up a tool. I had just torn at it, but he poked it a little, trying to find its soft spot. And sure enough, with nothing more than a small crowbar, Jim managed to work his way around the room, somehow lifting each sheet of paneling from the wall without damaging the ceiling. I&amp;#039;m still not sure how, exactly, he did it, but I know that he did it without breaking a sweat or hurting his shoulders or calling anything a terrible name. Jim went with wisdom rather than guns. That&amp;#039;s why I love my reciprocating saw. It feels like the wisdom that I haven&amp;#039;t entirely earned yet. If a wall is framed properly, each part holds every other part of it in place. It&amp;#039;s a complex combination of forces, of strength and resistance, tied together like a muscle. I&amp;#039;ve seen guys try to take down walls with hammers, and it&amp;#039;s pretty close to impossible. The wood has too much flex, and the nails have too much hold. Hitting it with a hammer does nothing but cut up your hands. But if you zip through the middle of each stud with a reciprocating saw, you can literally pull apart a wall with your bare hands, the way Jim managed to lift away that paneling \u2014 no noise, no vibration, no splinters, no mess. Make a few quick, well-placed cuts through a wall&amp;#039;s weakest points and the whole thing will unravel like a knot that seems impossible to solve until you find the one strand to pull. That&amp;#039;s how eighteen thousand pounds of our house have come down and been carried out \u2014 carefully but definitively, never to return. I can&amp;#039;t see any of it anymore. I can see only the original floors, unearthed. I&amp;#039;ve saved the beautiful trim and plaster moldings. I&amp;#039;ve found a gorgeous arch made of brick in our kitchen, inexplicably filled in however many years ago. I&amp;#039;ve discovered the original oak front doors, which I&amp;#039;ll restore and put back into place. I&amp;#039;ve found a lot of things worth saving. I&amp;#039;ve also found a few hundred miles of knob and tube. I&amp;#039;ve dug out a couple dozen buried junction boxes. I&amp;#039;ve tapped into that smoldering pocket of vermiculite. I&amp;#039;ve spotted a leak in the roof. I&amp;#039;ve found a sleeping bat, squeezed into an impossible space. I&amp;#039;ve found a lot of things that needed removing. I have that dumpster and a half to go before I can start the rest of my endless to-do list. But already, even through the haze of all that dust, I can see the future perfectly. All the while I&amp;#039;ve been taking down the house, I&amp;#039;ve been putting it back together, and in that house, in the house I&amp;#039;ve imagined myself building, I&amp;#039;m happy again. And so I&amp;#039;m happy now.  PLUS: More from the House on the My Second Empire Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a9310/chris-jones-house-rehab-0211/>