The last teardown

So far we've talked about renovating the hallway, bathroom, closet, kitchen, and living room. The only rooms left in the house left to update were the living room, with the terrible, terrible wallpaper and the bedroom, which had an un-usable closet and some awesome fake wood paneling. With me starting a new job in racing (see earlier post), we decided that I should take two weeks off between jobs to finish up our last big planned renovations. 

You can see the awesome wallpaper here

The painted paneling is wood....but not wood. The closet occupies the space opposite the built in hutch.

Our bedroom was fairly small, only around 10x11', so by the time you put two dressers, a double bed, and an armoir for hanging clothes, there was barely enough room for side tables. Even renovated, the closet wasn't going to provide much additional storage because it was very, very shallow (a hangar only fit where the door molding provided additional depth) and only about 1/3 of the hanging space we needed. After much deliberation, we decided to "delete" the built in hutch and reclaim the space in the bedroom. We had initially planned to have a very large closet, but after looking at how we could best use the space effectively, we decided on building a PAX system from Ikea, which would have drawers, hanging space, and some high up shelves.

Starting this, I knew that we were going to have to move a 2nd floor vent duct which ran behind the hutch. However, I didn't really know how much work this would be or what else we would find when we opened up the wall. It was a big leap for us to decide to essentially remove an entire wall!

Caroline's grandfather, John, helped tear down all of the plaster, many layers of wallpaper, and a bunch of the lathe. After being unhappy with how long it took to fix all of the plaster walls in the living room, these rooms were going to get 100% drywall.

Caroline's grandfather, hard at work

After only two days, we were already to the point where we could see through where the closet/hutch wall was! Do you notice that there is a large vent in the way? 

The silver tube is very much in the way as only the near wall is going to stay.

Now, I unfortunately can't seem to find any good pictures of the progress while moving the duct. I'm going to have Caroline look, and if we find them, I'll do a short post letting you know I've found them. What we ended up doing was moving the duct to the near wall and building a false ceiling protrusion to allow the duct to reconnect to the duct on the 2nd floor. You can see it in the finished pictures below.

Now, a short story about the paint job. I had finished all of the drywall, primed everything, and finished the molding, but wasn't able to finish the paint job before I had to head out to California. Being tired from rushing through the renovation as well as working hard at a new job, I wasn't looking forward to having to work all weekend to do the finish paint on the walls. To my great surprise, Caroline and my sister painted BOTH rooms while I was gone! I can home and was incredibly surprised and happy to have a relaxing weekend with Caroline. Plus, it looked great!

The "butter cookie" paint really makes the molding pop!

No more built in hutch!

If I recall correctly, the bedroom color is called "rhino"

With all of the paint complete, we had to put in our new PAX system. While the system honestly felt a little cheap compared to the quality of our other renovations, we weren't ready to spend several thousand dollars on a built in system that we likely wouldn't use very long (if we moved upstairs in a few years). Plus, the bedroom isn't exactly a high use area. We struggled a little getting them level, but once they were in they fit pretty well!

Each section had something like 36 nails. Caroline put every single one in.

Caroline gets the left, I get the right, and we share the middle

You can see in the picture above that we managed to find some soft storage containers that fit exactly above the PAX system below the ceiling. You can also see the ceiling drop down above the wardrobe where the vent scoots across. It isn't that big and looks almost like it was meant to be there!

As you can see below, even Ash approves of the new drawers!