In which we continue to pull up concrete

As I lie here in bed taking stock of my sore muscles and scrolling through the photos from yesterday's concrete-breaking fest, I am heartened by how much progress the two of us make in a day, doing this work by hand.

We had our favorite neighbor stop by yesterday to check on our progress and she looked in and exclaimed "Are you two doing all this by yourselves?"  Just the two of us, a pick axe and a pry bar!  

For me it is like cooking...I like to hand beat and hand chop.  I don't like the noise of machines and my back certainly could not take the constant hammering of a jack hammer.  

So, as Greg puts it...we are pick-axing mother f*#@ers!

The whole basement space took us about one full work day, spread over two days, with the help of our favorite contractor.  We had to leave the floor under the furnace for now, but plan to disconnect that soon in favor of a gas heating system.  

I got stuck working in the area under the building where there happened to be three friggin' layers of cement.  The top layer was about 2-3" thick in places, the middle layer was only about an inch thick and then the underlayer...shown above in brown, was another 3" thick!  We think it may have capped off a water cistern or something else because the whole section is rimmed with a short brick wall covered over in concrete.  While Greg was madly breaking up the floor in his section, I was breaking up sections and then repeating the same, twice over.  It was kind of a frustratingly cruel joke.  

Now of course, we have to remove the broken pieces