Helping out with a commercial overhaul on a sketchy, abandoned single story motel office that hasn’t seen a customer since the mid nineties. The new owners want to completely open up the main check in counter area to make a bright, modern lobby space. The structure is basically just concrete block and cheap wood panels, so I figured popping the old reception desk out would be a straightforward afternoon of sledgehammer work. What an absolute nightmare of buried layers.
The biggest issue right away was how the main wooden counter was anchored into the floor. The original builder didn’t just screw the frame down; they had literally poured two inches of thick commercial mortar right around the base studs, essentially cementing the wood directly into the foundation block. Every time I hit the framing with the sledgehammer, the vibration traveled straight up my arms without even cracking the wood. I had to go rent a heavy duty demolition hammer with a chisel tip just to chip away the concrete chunk by chunk while hunched over in a tiny vestibule.
Then came the total surprise of finding active old dial up telephone terminal lines still wired inside the hollow wall cavity. The wiring harness was a tangled mess of brittle copper cords that were still hooked up to an ancient, rusted junction box behind the drywall. We had to pause the demo for an hour just to verify the lines were completely dead with a voltmeter before we could cut the bundles out with reciprocating shears, and a massive nest of field mice insulation fell straight out of the hole when the wires broke free.
The main concrete floor is finally cleared of the old masonry base now and the rotted wood panels are stripped back to the bare block walls. The room looks twice as big without that massive partition desk blocking the light, but the old linoleum tiles underneath the counter are completely stained dark brown from some old pipe leak.