a glass cage of emotion!!@#@!!!!!
Saturday, November 5, 2011 at 5:39PM 
About 60% disassembled here... This hot mess of interiorial beauty must have been some magical window of knick-hackery and curio curiosities. This could beautifly display my collection of tiny porcelain hand-painted yip dogs, or steppin' it up a bit, my stash of Swarovski crystal cherubs, octopii, and vaguely suggestive large-horned unicorns. Since I don't have any of that crap (and wouldn't be caught dead with the kind of woman who would), away it goes, along with the wall it rode in on (in?). This will further impart the large, open-floor plan wonderfulness I'm going for, and perhaps extend the already impressive echo in the room to a full four-second decay time. I'm all about the RT60, yo.
Now, this thing was a whole lotta glass- sliding doors on the front and full piece of glass on the back, plus all the shelves- so going nuts with a hammer seemed like a decision I'd soon regret (and feel real dumb in the ER explaining to Dr. David De-glass). Instead, I donned heavy gloves and my sleek new CSI Abby-approved safety glasses and took the scientific approach. Hoping to pull the entire thing out as one unit, I pried off all the moldings (which did nothing, structurally) and tried to cut the silicon glue that seemed to hold it into the wall, but nothing would budge, and I couldn't start brute forcing it for obvious reasons.
Instead, I took the doors off and slooooowwwly pried off the big piece of back glass (visible on the floor), and gently set that guy down (heavy, it was). I then figured out that all the little shelves were silicon glued together, and that I could scrape off the glue with a metal putty scraper and a utility knife... carefully. I disassembled the entire thing that way and gently set the pieces into a big garbage can. Besides a couple small side splinters, I broke no glass at all- yay!
When I was done, all I had left were the little mirrors along the inside perimeter which I'm not too afraid of smashing when I go sledgehammer crazy on the entire wall soon...
With that out of the way, I decided to start hacking at the wall to see how tough that was gonna be. Since I don't yet have a serious sledgehammer, I took my Big Scary Prybar and hammered it into the wall, then took a standard hammer and smashed away at a piece of wood (otherwise the hammer makes wee holes). The wall is plaster, so it's pretty tough, and will need some serious force (I was also going easy because there's power in there, and I hadn't turned off the breakers). Interestingly, there was some newspaper shoved in the wall, and the jaundiced page of The Las Vegas Review Journal showed May 17th, 1981. At least now I know for sure that the wall was an addition and its removal won't cause certain structural calamity.
BTW, yesterday the nice gas guys removed the metal gas line that clumsily dropped from the ceiling, thus making the fireplaces into glorified oven burners. Yuck. You can see where it used to be right next to the fireplace where the paint is missing (of course they didn't miss painting the gas pipe). Hopefully nothing will stop me from opening the flues and making lovely raging Duraflame fires for my floozy future guests.
Honestly I'm not even sure how to take down the wall. I know you're supposed to sledgehammer away, but it would seem that the 2x4 framing would be pretty tough to break that way. I imagine I'll sledge as much plaster out as I can and take my 7 1/4" circular saw to the 2x4's. I also imagine I shall feel very manly on that day.
celebutante
Looking back on this (because I'm crazy), the wall was actually not plaster at all, but standard drywall. It was still a nightmare to get this wall down and made an impressively huge mess. I am glad this is behind me!