Just a Teeny Little Project

One does not simply move into a bedroom. Its broken ceiling and obnoxious walls must first be torn out, rebuilt and painted.

Chase hadn't even been gone for a whole week before we cleared out his old bedroom and ripped into it. I felt a little weird about it, like we were never letting him come home again or something. But of course we would be rearranging the house - our house is too small and our kids are getting too big to rope off any space to save for them. And with Romney already being a senior and planning on moving out in a year or so, we had no time to waste!

The plan is to have Romney move into the bigger bedroom after freshening it up. We were talking about just smoothing and painting the walls, but the ceiling really needed attention too - its layers of paper have been cracking and splitting for longer than I can remember, plus is has the weird sloping angle on one side. Why not just fix it all at once? Poor Troy. Of course it's so easy to say that but things are never simple with this old house. I've been trying to do as much as I can to keep the burden from being all on his shoulders. It still falls mainly on him, but believe me, I pitch in however I can and stick by his side. I hate it when I want to do something but it requires so much from him. Half the time I don't even realize how much I'm asking! Troy, you're so wonderful and I'm so grateful for you.

So here is the cleaned out room:

We covered the floor in plastic sheeting and boards to try to protect the carpet. First to go? The wretched boob light!

Troy let me take the first few swings at the ceiling. Man, what a mess. It was all lath and plaster and just got everywhere as we were tearing it apart.

Troy took over for an hour and we got to this point:

That was on the first Saturday in October. On Monday I did the rest.

 

Tuesday I spent hours trying to clean it up and get it all to the dump. Thank heavens for mini vans! In fact, Romney came with me to purchase the boards for the floor. As she and I were loading the sheets of MDF into the van, this dude walked by and called to us, "And THAT is why minivans are AWESOME!!" It was so funny. We laughed and flexed and heartily agreed.

This van load plus two green-cans full of broken plaster got it mostly cleaned up but of course we weren't done making messes. Next came using the sawzall on the beams creating the slanted ceiling. 

It's occurring to me that a play-by-play on our room construction might not be the most interesting blog post ever but hey, it's for posterity. We have started putting some new beams up into the ceiling to create a level surface for the dry wall to attach. Then comes drywall and repairs.... I'm so excited for this to come together. You know who else is really excited? That would be Romney.