How to Properly Use a Crowbar

Hope you all had a great weekend.  We were hit by the big blizzard on Friday. We ended up getting over a foot of snow when all was said and done.  Schools were closed, my husband stayed home from work and one by one all of the activities we had scheduled for the weekend were cancelled due to the weather.  It gave us a great opportunity to do some work in our basement that is going through a mold remediation process.  

All of the carpet is ripped up and all of the mold has been cut out and all that is left is for these air cleaners to be left running twenty-four seven through Tuesday.  

Here is where the mold was cut out from under the window.  They also found mold in an interior closet and cut that out as well.  Wednesday the painters arrive to repair all of the sheetrock first and then start to head toward the pretty stuff.

Since we were snowed in anyhow, it was a good opportunity to take on some projects in the basement. While my husband worked on the closet that will soon house the new commercial size dehumidifier, I tackled this closet...soon to be my craft/sewing closet.  You can check out here all of my inspiration for this closet.  

Demolition was fun.  Using a hammer I banged off all of those shelves.  What a great way to get out a little aggression!  They were held in with these super long nails that the contractor must have put in with a nail gun, so there were no heads of the nail to pull out.  I had to just hammer the shelves out by banging from the bottom up.  The shelves were the easy part.  The support brackets all around that were also nailed in using that huge nail gun were my issue.  I had to use a crowbar to get off the horizontal supports.

  Well, the sheetrock is only 1/2" in this closet and no matter how careful I was trying to be, this is what kept happening.  Seriously... I was destroying the walls.  This was not a good situation.  

Now my husband and I are very handy, but we couldn't figure out how to make this stop happening.  So, I called my dad.  I told him what I was doing and that I was making swiss cheese of the walls.  He told me to use a scrap piece of wood so that the crowbar had something to lean into that was sturdier than the sheetrock.

Just like that the problem was solved.  I just set up the crowbar under the wood I wanted to remove and then set the scrap piece of wood on the wall.  I embarrassed to say that I didn't know this before my dad told me.  But, that's exactly why I'm sharing this with you all today.   Hopefully this information will save someone else from destroying their walls the way I did.

Here are some safety tips on using a crowbar:

1.  Wear safety goggles.  I had more things hit me in the face from this project so the glasses were a definite must.

2.  Wear safety gloves.  You want to protect your hands as well.

3.  Use a piece of scrap wood to have the crowbar push into.

4.  Find a narrow crack under what you are trying to pry.  It was tough sometimes trying to find an opening for the crowbar.  A few times I used the back of the hammer which was a little thinner to get it started.

5.  In general you should pry with your body away from the object.  I was working in a closet with some narrow angles, and yes, I got hit by more than one of these boards when it flew out.  You should also work SLOWLY.   Once I starting using the scrap wood, these pieces were flying out way easier.  So easy, that at least three times I peaked in the bathroom mirror to see if I was bleeding from somewhere on my face.  Luckily I was not. :)

As for the holes I made in my closet before I learned how to use a crowbar correctly...well,  I guess my painter just got more walls to fix.  

-Judy