And the walls came tumbling down....2/5 & 2/6

So, we started this weekend off with a bang. We have had a lot of rain recently and my ever-efficient hubbs was just trying to maximize his time. He works a full time job and runs our business so he usually doesn't have a surplus of time. He sank the front end of his truck down to the bumper in the back yard trying to get close to the door so we could just toss material out the door and into the bed of the truck. His intentions are always so good, but this one ended up wasting time instead of saving it :) He caught a lot of slack from the ladies on this one for sure! But, after getting the truck out, (have I mentioned what good friends we have?) we were able to to get quite a bit of work done.

Master bedroom demo

The walls and ceiling in the master bedroom are made of tongue and groove pine wood. Because we have remove the exterior walls to insulate, we decided to remove the interior walls as well. The ceiling will remain in place and we will sheet rock over it. Removing the walls will save us some money with the electrician. The less walls that they have to cut through to run wire, the less money you will spend on labor with an electrician. We are saving all of the wood for repairs in the existing floors and for the flooring in one of the upstairs bedrooms. I mentioned in an earlier post that we had discovered that one of the bedrooms upstairs did not have a sub floor. The existing floor was installed directly over the floor joists. Our options to fix this were:

1. pull up the existing floor, lay a new subfloor down and reinstall flooring (um, just a little bit on the dangerous side)

2. install a subfloor over the existing floor and put carpeting down (carpeting, barf...)

3. lay new flooring over existing floor, running the opposite direction to keep the original look, save time and money and strengthen the floor. (winner, winner chicken dinner!)

Upstairs bedrooms demo

The walls and ceiling in the bedroom upstairs without the subfloor had beadboard on the them. The boys had an unpleasant surprise when they pulled the ceiling down in that room. Lots of loose insulation that had to be bagged up. We tossed the beadboard because it is covered in lead paint and shoveled all of the insulation into garbage bags.

This is the bedroom on the right upstairs and it had tongue and groove wood on the walls and ceiling as well. Part of this room will be a full bathroom. We will have to bump into a portion of the knee-wall space to maximize the footprint upstairs. Access to the bathroom will be out in the hallway, keeping both bedrooms private. The wood harvested from this room will also be saved, either for this project or an upcoming one. The boys came back later and worked on pulling the nails from the wood and stacking it for future use. We have a huge pile right now in the kitchen. Like I mentioned before, saving materials is a cost saver, but you cannot imagine how many times the stuff has to be relocated, ugh...

Looking ahead, we will be working on finishing up the demo, securing some structural issues and painting the roof and siding. Replacement windows have been ordered and in that process, I have learned how challenging sourcing materials will be for this project. But, I'm a girl who loves a good challenge :)