Finally!  It’s time to start demolition!  The first order of business is dismantling a gypsum board wall.  I got a start by removing the gypsum board from the back side of the first wall.  I’ve never heard of anyone taking the time to dismantle a wall before and it’s certainly not the sort of thing a contractor would mess around with since the cost for the required time would be more than the cost of replacing the materials.  It would probably be cost prohibitive to hire someone to do this unless you can hire unskilled labor at a really low rate.  However I decided to take this approach since I’m doing the work myself and disassembly and reuse of the drywall, as well the framing, is more sustainable than smashing the drywall and sending it to a landfill.  It also saves money and of course that’s what my experiment is all about.

Dismantling the wall starts with finding the screws.

All drywall has been removed from one side of the wall.

Since I wasn’t dealing with lath and plaster I had hoped disassembly would be a relatively clean job.  I discovered that finding the drywall screws was a difficult and messy job.  I experimented with seeing if a magnet would help me identify where the screws were located but I didn’t have much luck with that so I resorted to using a rotary sander to grind down the drywall in line with the studs to find the screws.  I also ground down the drywall compound at the joints to free up the edges and this was even worse since there was quite a bit of compound to remove and I generated that much more dust.  Since I was working on the back side of the kitchen wall I was able to keep the dust out of the kitchen.

I also went through my kitchen cabinets and packed up everything that I thought I can do without during the remodeling.  Everything I expect to use got redistributed in the remaining cabinets that will be removed later for phase two.  I then removed the cabinets on the kitchen side of the wall I’m dismantling.  I thought I might be able to find a temporary place for my full height pantry cabinet.  Without emptying it I tried to slide it over a bit but given the weight of the contents and without the bracing of the wall it fell apart with the contents scattered everywhere.  Luckily it held mostly boxes and bags and only two glass jars that didn’t break.  It took most of a full day to empty the cabinets, redistribute and pack up the contents, and remove the cabinets.  I hadn’t quite anticipated it taking that much time but now I can put up a dust partition in the center of my kitchen and get serious about removing the rest of the wall.