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We Have Three Fewer Closets

As part of the remodel we’re moving the wall between the master bedroom and the master bath to make the master bath a little roomier. As it is, the door can’t be opened all the way because it hits the counter. We’re going to pull the wall back a bit and replace the swinging door with a pocket door (Laura would say Squee or some such at this point).

To do this we have to remove two of the existing closets and rebuild one of them in a slightly different location. This is how things started.

Master bedroom

The closet to the left with the swinging door is the linen closet and will be moving to a larger space in the hall. The closet to right is Laura’s and the one that needs to be moved.

And this is how it looks now.

Master closet gone

So, that’s two closets gone. What about the third? Ah, well. The future TV room has a closet (with a water heater in it that will be moving).

The library is on the other side of that closet and we need all the room we can get in the library. So we’re going to rebuild the TV room closet to be only 12 inches deep. That should be plenty for DVDs and the like.

Here are before and after shots.

Library
Before
After
After

So, that’s what I did Monday and Tuesday.

 

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Cleaning up a bit

We went over to our house on Sunday to do a little tidying up. You know how it goes. Work is messy. Sometimes time needs to be taken to get control of the mess that had been made.

I started with the totally easy stuff, and cleaned up the pile in the master bedroom that had accumulated with the walls coming down.

Maybe about half (or so) of the flooring in the dining room has bothered to let go of the underlayment so far. Ask Dave about the amount of work he’s put in on that little chore, and how much he’s looking forward to doing the rest. LOL Oh my. That pile of flooring sitting there over by the window has been driving me a bit bonkers, so clearing that away was my next task. I decided to play with the settings on my phone, and created a little time-lapse video of this chore:

As Dave’s been tearing the paneling out of the bedrooms he’s been stacking the wood against the wall in the living room. While it’s a grand place to stage the planks, boards, moulding, trim, and miscellaneous bits of wood, it can’t all stay there. For one thing, he means to take down the walls in the living room, too, but can’t do it with all that other wood leaning there. We forgot that one of the reasons we wanted to take the truck over was that we wanted to move the paneling and other pieces of wood from the house down to the barn. So we took the BMW. Ha! Because 8-foot-tall paneling pieces won’t fit in the BMW, we staged it all in the second garage. First I had to clean out the garage a bit.

Apparently, when the previous owner decided to put this house on the market, the yard wasn’t the only thing that was over-filled with blackberries and ivy. Yes, the garage was, too. They cut the plant material off at the outside of the wall, and again a couple feet down from the top of the walls, and left it all in a pile in the middle of the floor. That was months ago, so it was nicely dried up, and easy to move. I rolled all that plant-mess up, and carried it down to the nearest burn pile. Ta da!

As I dealt with the plant material and sweeping up, Dave continued getting nails out of the boards and planks. When I announced that I had rolled up the dead plant bits, and gotten rid of them, he joined me in the garage to move some of the bigger things out of the way, you know, the things attached to the walls. There is this one shelving unit that’s basically okay just in the way, so it was detached from the wall and moved around a few times. I don’t know if you can really see it, but there’s part of a cupboard hanging on the wall toward the right side of the above photo. There wasn’t much left of it or its neighbor to the right. There’s nothing left of either of them now. The wood from those cabinets was in such bad shape that it wasn’t worth saving. More sweeping, more plant material cut down, more sweeping… Dave has a plan. We start moving the wood from the living room to the garage in a large, slightly wonky figure eight. I took a brief squirrel moment, and cut some ivy out of a small nearby tree. I’m going to need a heavy pair of loppers to get the rest. Finally, the wood is all moved! Here it is in the garage. The living room walls are visible again. Hooray!


Oh, and yes, there are two (three?) door frames still in the living room. There is a different plan for those that will be executed on a different day. Now it’s time to stop for the day. Because it’s time to stop, here’s my closing photo:

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Removing Some Paneling and More Board and Batten

Started removing some of the paneling up stairs.

This stuff is actually rather hard to remove. First off, it’s pretty high-quality. The panels overlap at the seams instead of simply butting up against each other. That means that you have to take them off in the right order (i.e., you have to remove the top panel first).

 

In addition to that, they used 2″ nails with heads instead of panel nails in most places. That makes it really hard to get them to pop. Most of them are pulling through.

 

I also removed most of the remaining board and batten in my office.

 

That’s a lot of wood!

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A Bit More Demolition

The last few days I’ve been doing more demolition.

I removed the ceiling trim and paneling from part of the soffit in the kitchen so that we can see how far up the new cabinets can go.

Those big purlins (beams), on the ceiling are apparently just for show. They stop at the walls and are attached with nothing more than home-made joist hangers.
Soffit and purlin

Having removed some of the ceiling trim I went ahead and finished removing the rest of it upstairs and down. The results aren’t much to look at but here’s the pile of trim.

The narrow boards at the left are the trim (the wider ones to the right are the board and batten that I removed from my office a while ago).

I also removed the shelves and shelf supports from the pantry.
Pantry before
Pantry after

 

And here’s an odd thing.

Yep. That’s a bare copper wire going across the corner of the pantry. On the opposite side of the wall to the right is a light switch. On the opposite side of the wall to the left is where the intercom master unit was. That wire is how they grounded the intercom system. Nice install guys. Not! 😕

I also finished removing all of the faux shutters, removed all five (yes, five), small satellite dishes, removed the (really ugly), medicine cabinet from the master bath, and finished removing all of the folding door hardware.

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We’re avoiding the carpet in the library

The carpeting is stuck firmly to the linoleum in the library, and that in turn is stuck quite firmly to the concrete. Pulling up either/both is obviously something that can wait. Instead, Dave decided to pull up the carpet in the family room the other day. I think that must have been Friday. Naturally, he forgot to take any photos. At least, he didn’t share any with me. If any photos of this process exist, we’ll make sure they’re in an appropriate photo album, so they can be viewed.

Between now and then, I showed up at the house, and we had a grand time. I pulled staples out of the subfloor in the family room, while Dave pried carpeting off, you guessed it, more linoleum in the dining room.

This is what it looked like in the area where the family room and dining room meet. Ugly dark carpeting in an attractive arc over classic 1970s lino, which is on top of the subfloor.

The clean bits were under the family room carpeting, the ghastly bits under the dining room carpet.

I was industriously pulling staples (who said that it was okay to put down hundreds of the things to hold down one little pad… certainly not me!), while Dave made quite a bit of progress on the carpeting.

Here’s the final bit at the edge of the kitchen.

In the back of my mind I’d kind of wondered why the linoleum in the kitchen didn’t match anything else in the house. The cupboards all match. Why are the floors different everywhere? Well, apparently they didn’t start out that way, not upstairs at any rate. The horrifying lino that is currently in the kitchen was laid on top of the original lino. The dining room and kitchen matched. Now that makes more sense. It’s not good news, but it does make sense.

It’s time for a happy dance. All the carpeting in the dining room is up!

Oops. Wait a minute. There’s this corner at the opposite end of the staircase, under the windows. Oops.

You can’t see it in this picture, but all of the carpeting is gone from the dining room. Most of the linoleum is still there, as it’s stuck pretty good. Pulling that out is a project for another day.
(Note, no this is not the same photo as two above. See how this one’s darker? Clouds.)

Dave suggested that I end each post with a picture of our view. A view from my office sort of thing, or more appropriately, a view of the day. Either way you look at it, this is it.

Thank you for joining us on our journey!

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Score!

So, the other day I started pulling up the carpet in the family room. The first thing to do, of course, was to remove the heat vent grills.

Puling up one of them revealed something shiny. Ooh! what have we here? Aha! it’s a dime. That brings us up to 26 cents. Yee haw!

Wait. There’s more down there. What is it? Wow! five little cars and a Thomas the Tank locomotive. Score!

(picture of the cars and locomotive)
Our New Fleet

Some little kid must have been bummed. Laura contends an older sibling put them down on purpose. I think think the kid might have done it himself.

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Indoor board and batten begins to come down

Monday

On Monday we decided it was “sweep the barn day.” So, we swept the barn. Dave worked on the loft while I swept downstairs. The weather was perfect for manual labor. Well before we were done we were both down to our shirtsleeves, even though it was in the low 50s out there, and the barn doors were wide open.

Dave started by stacking the bales of straw. There are nine of them. The straw and hay ladder will be going to friends who have horses.

I created this pile of, er, sweepings, by attacking this one corner with my broom. I wonder how long it’s been since the barn’s been swept. I’m thinking it’d been quite a while.

More progress! I still have to get in under the sink, behind the wood stoves, and behind the huge air compressor. The easy stuff, the middle of the room, is done now, though. To be Ansel-safe, though, the icky parts in the corners need to be cleaned up, too. No telling what’s back there. I’m sure it’s stuff we don’t want our little boy getting into, whatever it is. Ick.

Tuesday

Dave went up to the house without me, so that I could get some stuff done at my desk for a change. You know, the fun things, like paying bills, balancing checkbooks, and the like. He worked between appointments there. The locksmith came by and changed the lock on the mailbox (the tenant forgot to leave the key for us), the insurance company’s photographer swung by to take some photos, the pest guy came by to say he couldn’t treat for the beetles we have as his truck with that equipment on it needs fixing, but while he was there he treated for carpenter ants and the wasps that we found in the wall a few days before, and… I forget what else happened. I know I’m forgetting someone.

His tasks for the day started with getting up the last of the linoleum from the floor in his office. Well, as much as he could. There’s this one area that’s stuck pretty good. Neither the floor scraper nor the crowbar will lift it. Suggestions, anyone?

We’re hoping that the linoleum in the TV room and downstairs guest room don’t need to be pulled before hardwood goes down, so Dave finished cleaning the carpet pad off the TV room floor as best he could. Those yellow bits are resisting, but super thin. Here’s hoping.

The walls in Dave’s office and the library are board and batten where there’s no brick. Rough cut planks. I don’t know for sure if they are leftovers from the exterior of the house, but to me they look like they might be. Dave might disagree. I don’t think I’ve thought to bring up the topic when he’s been around. Either way, though this is a picture of the outside of the house, and the boards have been painted, this is a good example of what the indoor walls look like, too. This is also shows how lovely (cough) the house looks with more of those white plastic shutters removed.

Next he attacked the walls downstairs. He left walls alone that have switches or outlets or anything else electrical for another day, as we want Ansel to be safe when he comes to visit.

Dave’s wall before

Dave’s wall after

You may have noticed the insulation on the wall. That’s an interior wall. The other side of that wall is the TV room. There’s no insulation on exterior walls in this room, so he left the paneling on those walls for now. What with winter coming on, it could get cold in there with nothing between you and the weather but one layer of 40-year-old cedar exterior siding. Brr.

Dave worked on the library walls a bit, too, again leaving panels where electrical wires could get tangled in Ansel’s sweet little paws.

Wondering what was surprising? Dave found four of these sad little mouse carcasses when he was taking the walls down.

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The demolition begins

Dave and I spent about five hours over at our house (that sounds so strange!) yesterday. Mostly we ripped out the carpeting in the TV room and the guest room downstairs. We (meaning Dave) also got started ripping out the carpet in his office, but let’s back up a tiny bit. We also narrowly avoided (especially Dave) getting stung by a bunch of startled wasps.

When we closed escrow we only received two keys, the only two keys that the seller had, both unlocking all exterior doors around the house. The mailbox key? The garage door remotes? Gone. Kept by the last tenants, apparently. Arg. To help keep all and sundry out of our new house, we bought a couple new deadbolts. Dave installed the second one when we got there yesterday. To keep myself busy while he was swapping out the deadbolt on the kitchen door, I took a screwdriver and removed switch plate covers around the living room and dining room, avoiding anything that didn’t use a standard screwdriver. When he was done with the lock, Dave attacked one of the places where cable comes into the house in the living room. Then, suddenly, he was backing up fast, batting at his hair, and making strange noises. You’d be making strange noises, and flailing around, too, if you were suddenly attacked by a bunch of wasps.

Here he’s calmed down a bit, but mostly because he had a can of “instant death” in hand to help fight off the swarm.

We opened up what windows we could (the front windows are glued shut), the door, anything to try to encourage the mean-spirited wee beasties to beat a hasty retreat. (A couple hours later, when all but one were dead or departed, I used the included fireplace tools to sweep up the carcasses, and dump them outside. I also pushed the cover back over the hole the wasps emerged from, to encourage them to stay put.) Later on we found where they’re entering the house. We’ll deal with that another day.

We’d thought to maybe start pulling up the rugs upstairs first off, but decided to begin downstairs. Just in case.

We started with the old mottled brown carpet in the TV room. It matches, sort of, the carpet on the stairs and upper hallway. Really terrifying stuff. We started pulling it up, and were surprised by what we found. No tack strips. No padding layer. Nope. Here we had a thin layer of padding stuff that was stuck to the bottom of the carpet… and to the classic brown linoleum floor below.

And here we were thinking that the carpet was horrible because it was original to the house. Nope. Turns out it’s horrible, because it’s horrible.

(P.S. Everyone wants a water heater in their TV room closet, right?)

Well, that was fun. Yes, we left a bunch of the pad on the floor for later. We moved on to the downstairs guest room.

This is what we were expecting. Tack strip. Pad. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Wait a second, though. Yes, that’s right. They installed the built-in bookcase over the carpet. Oy.

What’s underneath? More brown linoleum, like in the TV room.

Next surprise: they glued the tack strip to the old linoleum floor.

What we both found interesting is that this room looks bigger without the light colored carpet. Must be the shine on the linoleum.

Moving on to Dave’s office we (well, Dave) pulls off the baseboards in preparation.

These walls are horrible. They’ve been a source of frustration for people for quite a while. So far, in pulling out the baseboards and carpeting in Dave’s office we’ve gotten rich, found one red die, and a little plastic toy thing. I wonder what else we’ll find.

In this room, the thin dark brown carpeting is stuck so well to the linoleum that it’s easier to pull up the linoleum than to pull the carpet off of it. So that’s what’s happening here. Strip by painful strip. These things weigh a ton. Dave’s currently wishing he was about 20 years younger. Maybe more. Ouch.

You know what, though? The room already looks tons bigger. Looking forward to getting the rough-cut paneling off the walls in here, too, but that will have to wait until another day.