11.01.15

A classmate in need of some old hardwood planks meets us in the morning and we drive out to the site together. She’s able to salvage a large sliding door from one of the tractor sheds on the site, and we get a big bag of homemade perogies in exchange (thanks Aleksandra!).



Our own focus shifts from the theoretical to the pragmatic. In the 1970s, the house was unfortunately insulated with a product called Urea-Formaldehyde Foam Insulation (UFFI) that was only around for a few years before it was deemed toxic and damaging to occupants’ health. The CMHC has an information fact sheet on it here.

The foam is yellow and crumbles to the touch, creating a high volume of dust. Although we’re wearing ventilation masks whenever we stir it up, we need to determine the best way of removing it, as it’s in all of the exterior walls. In the morning, we attempt to reach it from the outside, but being up on a ladder struggling with a crowbar and sledgehammer proves to be too dangerous.

During this investigation, we uncover two small pieces of the home’s history. The first is a blue stamp on a piece of fir siding that identifies Victoria, B.C. as its place of origin. The second is a shredded sticker on the back of the exterior building paper:



From the inside, we are able to lift it out in blocks with a shovel and bag it, which keeps dust levels down. For now, this seems to be the best solution.

11.01.16

We’ve identified a shared desire to gain more control and precision over the photographs we take, so that interior images might become an inherent part of the deconstruction process, as opposed to an afterthought. Until this point, the tripod has been arbitrarily positioned and aligned to capture a three-quarter view. Scenes are staged and repeated multiple times if the lighting is not successful.

With photographs squared on their subject, whether it be a wall or the floor, a series of rooms can be brought together to construct a re-imagined plan or section of the house.

Today, we mount the tripod to the ceiling and return the hardwood we removed back to the bedroom floor. Boards are washed in light as they are taken away, similar to how they might be pulled up in future rooms. Our own occupation emerges as my body and the floorboards begin to overlap in the darkened space.



11.01.17

In the first semester, the furnace was discussed as a source of heat in the cold, an object of desire that we were working closer and closer toward. Since starting the deconstruction, there has been little incentive to maintain the fire, as the heat is too far removed from our current area of focus to have any meaningful effect.

With a developing interest in full-scale drawing on the existing building paper, we’ve begun to reconsider the medium with which these images could be created. Although spray paint was suitable for the drawings washed with light in a darkened room, the result lacks subtlety when taken out of context.

By introducing smoke as a new drawing material, we will be able to regain control over the fire in the basement and the growing woodpile in the kitchen. At the same time, the resultant drawings can be brought into the cycle of disassembly. Wood is stripped from structure, an aperture is drilled, and that structure is revealed in the room beyond. Concurrent to this process, the wood is broken down, fed into the fire, and transformed into smoke that makes permanent the projection upstairs.

Based on these thoughts, we spent the morning in the basement rerouting the ductwork from the chimney to the supply air system. Preliminary tests of filling one room in the house with smoke were somewhat successful, but it may take a number of hours to leave a dark enough film on the paper.



11.01.18

-30 degrees Celsius this morning - the coldest day so far. We leave early and decide to delay the smoking process until next weekend.