This takes GUTS!

Last time we checked in, we had taken down all of the wood paneling in the sunroom and two walls of the living room…

However, we still had two more walls and the ceiling to tackle..plus the fact that we had a drain pipe malfunction in the guest bedroom and lots of panic. The demo in this room was a welcome distraction from the drama of the water damage/insurance/blah blah blah. It certainly gave us a chance to take out our frustrations.

First up was the removal of all of the trim and baseboard heater covers. We did all of the prep work on Friday, then got started early Saturday morning. We used a saw to cut through the tops and bottoms of the boards to make it easier to pry them loose and avoid hitting the baseboard heaters and cause any damage. We also got on a roll with using a Sawzall borrowed from Josh’s dad to cut the nails from the side to remove the boards with less breakage.

^ WHY, YES..that is an interior wall WITH insulation and an exterior wall without insulation. 🙂

So, this little area has a funny story…We ripped out the top part of the tin foil insulation (not a technical term!), then revealed our….attic. We totally didn’t put two and two together for a second since we enter our attic from our mudroom area which is down two mini flights of stairs, I think we thought we have uncovered a huge time capsule or something…nope, just our Christmas Tree. Haha!

^ All walls done-starting on the ceiling….

After getting cleaned up (we could finally take showers since the plumber came on Saturday morning and got our shower up and running!), we went out for sushi and came back to our house for a rousing game of Cards Against Humanity.

We woke up on Sunday morning ready to go …. not. We were tired. I was cranky. But we kept on truckin’. I was pretty much at my breaking point (tears were almost coming out of my eyeballs) when Josh found this:

It is a corner of a newspaper dated November 16, 1954 and it totally put me in a better mood because I JUST KNEW there was a note/newspaper/etc somewhere in this mystery of a house which, again, was supposedly built in 1957 and obviously this section was completed before that. I love being right so much that my tears disappeared and were replaced with determination.

We think that after our new insulation is put in and before the planked ceiling goes in, we will put one page of this old newspaper back into the wall, along with a note from us and a now newspaper so that it might brighten the mood of a future owner of our house when they are renovating the house 60 years from now. Cool thought. 🙂

Anywho, back to work….

..and by about 4:30 that night, the room looked like this:

Weee!!!

This past weekend, we took on the wonderful job of insulation. I won’t even go in to how that went..it was just pretty terrible.

After removal…

THE LIVING ROOM IS GUTTED CELEBRATORY PICTURE!! 🙂 WEEEEE!!