After a winter's worth of brainstorming and designing, we finally created a new floor plan on Sweet Home 3D that we were ready to move forward with (more about that HERE).
We waited for the weather to promise a steady warmth (and our tax return to arrive) and we packed up my in-laws (again!) and moved them out of the East Wing and in to the converted sun porch.
We promised to complete their apartment before the season turned again. It gets MIGHTY cold in the porch room. (We took our turn out there during my second and third trimester).
Needless to say, we didn't have any time to waste. We grabbed our hammers and geared up for Demo Day!
Everybody works around here - no matter how small or how bald.
We started with the easy stuff - shelves, doors, window treatments...
Then we let loose on a few walls...
The place came apart on its own in some areas...and we found lots of surprises:
Surprise - the ceiling tiles are cardboard! Some of them had been eaten through by termites and just disintegrated in our hands. The tiles that were still "in good condition" were ugly as all get out and were coming down!
Surprise - the insulation we were hoping to keep in tact was 1/4" thick...maybe an R value of .5? USELESS!
Surprise - the original exterior siding - lead paint and all!
No Photo Available.
Surprise - the carpet padding melted/disintegrated decades ago and now needs to be scraped from the subfloor with this beast:
It's called a Goldblatt Floor Scraper. I'm pretty sure Mr.Steady picked it up at Lowe's. It was insanely heavy, but it got the job done. Something lighter with an exchangeable blade like our hand-held scraper might have been a better bet.
Just two days later (with some help from a young teenage body on loan from church) Mr. Steady had stripped the place clean! And after 5 trips to the dump and a pile of "possibly reusable materials" on the porch....we were staring at a hollow shell:
(FYI: that door leads to the garage which would be a crucial part of the final design, but we were still storing materials in there and couldn't begin the demo process out there yet).
All of the exterior walls were coming down and getting relocated, but we wanted to double check the ceiling rafters and the roof structure to be sure none of them were load bearing.
We started to get an idea of how the layout would work. In fact, after all that labor (and the sudden added cost of insulation) we decided to reconfigure the bedroom to save some time/money on moving the existing windows. Besides, we needed new calculations for the room size with the 1/5" sheetrock adjustment...... So, back to Sweet Home!
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