I wanted to title this entry "Gluttons for Punishment," but I just barely did that. Apparently we are often gluttons for punishment. And this punishment is way WAY worse than just driving through a Christmas light display on a cold December night.
Where to even start?
How about here, with an old yucky bedroom.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful for this room. It has served us well for a very long time. Most recently, it housed both of my girls, for years and years, actually. They got along so well, despite the cramped quarters. There was a bunk bed plus two dressers in there! It made it easier to ignore the carpet and walls - they were too covered up to even see!
But with Chase away on his mission and Romney (mostly) away at UVU and Emma moved into the big bedroom, it was time to pay some attention to this little space. After all, Chase isn't that far from returning. So once Christmas was over and Romney's winter break ended, we had one final weekend visit from my brother Peter, and then it was time to tear into it. Literally.
Part I: The Demolition
I spent the first week or so just on demolition. It only took about 10 minutes of work to realize that we were going to need a dumpster. I was at first trying to just pack our big green garbage can and would add more debris to it each week, but the pile grew way faster than I expected. The amount of material we pulled out of that tiny space seemed like more volume than the room could actually hold! The lath, the plaster, the heaps of insulation from the ceiling (although there was absolutely none in the walls) and the pieces of closet that Troy busted up made the dumpster very worthwhile.
Troy reminded me that I would be coming across a wasp's nest at some point. He had killed off the flying nightmares long ago, but we couldn't access the nest. Oh I found it! Luckily it had stayed empty.
We were so excited to finally get the room emptied and the carpet ripped up and hurled into the dumpster. Much of the reason that we were digging this deeply into the room is because we knew that there was actually no foundation under the walls. So if we were going to do it at all, we were going to have to remove absolutely everything from the floor until we got to dirt, and then dig down into the dirt for 2 or 3 feet so we could access enough space to pour footings and foundations under the two outside walls. So when we finally got to the wood under the carpet it was pretty exciting. I pulled out the camera and got ready to film the big dirt reveal.
Only, as soon as Troy pried up the super heavy boards we found....more wood. So he started to pry up the 2nd layer of wood and we found....linoleum! And under the linoleum? A thick layer of newspapers, all spread neatly out. We actually had a lot of fun looking at them - they were all from February and March of 1949 - almost exactly 75 years ago. We saved a big stack of them, including one headline about The University of Utah beating BYU in a basketball game. I think we'll frame that.
Finally under the newspapers we found an old porch floor. It was made of douglas fir, the same wood that provides our living room floor. It was painted, and had to be torn up. We were sorry to destroy it, but it had to be done!
Finally, many inches down below the level of the door, we got to the dirt. It was slightly anti-climactic after all that. Both Troy and I kept thinking that we would pry up a layer of floor and peek underneath only to find a skeleton grinning up at us. Nah. It was just dirt.
Luckily we still had a dumpster out front....because a whole heck of a lot of that dirt needed to end up there!
To be continued......
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