It's Demo Day!

When weather looks like this, its recommended that one stay indoors! Many people like to cozy up with a blanket, a good book and a cup of cocoa. I, on the other hand, just itch for a project and winter is when the inside of our house usually takes on major transformations.

This year's target: the downstairs living room.

This is the space we gather for our home school studies but it really was a drab and rather dark space that nobody enjoyed being in. One wall was completely covered in old brick with a massive wood burning stove. At one point, it was used to heat the house and had a pipe feeding into the main heat line. Ancient wallpaper decorated the rest of the walls in less than desirable designs. The hallway adjacent to this room was unfinished with exposed ductwork and no light.

The time arrived! We grabbed a few sledge hammers and some helping hands. The massive fireplace was the first thing to go. Cleaning it out removed half it's weight at least! We found huge nails, bolts, hinges and fence pieces. We have another wood burning fireplace upstairs that is a little nicer and this other one was never used so we ended up selling it to a very happy individual. It took four men to lug the thing up the stairs on a dolley and outside. I don't even want to estimate how heavy the thing was!

Next phase, the walls came a tumbling down! We removed all the brick because it was purely for looks and wasn't structurally necessary. The boys loved this part!

The scrpaing away of two layers of wallpaper wasn't the most pleasant but it had to be done. A little spray bottle of water and a scraper did the trick. Because the paper had been mounted directly to the unpainted wallboard, it took large parts of the wallboard paper off with it. Before I could mud and texture over the walls, I had to make sure I sealed everything with a stain block and sealer primer.

Electrical, drywall, tape, mud and texture - these were all in the process. Something we have discovered is that whenever we are doing a renovation we have to expect challenges like walls that aren't straight, random cracks and quirks, and doing our best to mesh the new into the existing old. I'm getting really good with my patching skills! We found some awesome doors at our local Habitat for Humanity store but non of them were pre-hung. Building frames for all of them was quite the trick but it was worth it!

We put the finishing touches on everything, including building a bookshelf and installing an electric fireplace and now we can sit back and enjoy the benefits of our efforts!

The bookshelf is now filled to capacity with books!

We will eventually replace the carpet to fill in the bare spot where the hearth once was.

The kids and myself now love this space! We created a wall where we can now project our movies on the wall for movie night. Things are much more cozy, bright and lovely and that is a good way to have it!