Sunday, September 16, 2007

This Olde House - Part 3

Eighteen more hours of work on the house. This time we dropped the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. And put up a 14" header. Something to match the one we blew out last week.

Couple of pictures to mark the occasion. (Click them to enlarge, I think.) The first is the "before" shot. The cabinet is going to come out. The wall is going to come out. And there is a large standing cabinet barely visible on the left that is going to come out. As a bit of foreshadowing, the big Spanish tiles on the floor (along with the huge grout lines) are next on the hit list.

The next shot (click to enlarge?) is half way through the demo process. We removed the cabinet and most of the sheet rock. Now, exposed for the first time in probably a decade, you can see the original color of the wood panels. I think it is pea green. Darker than lime. Lighter than grass.

Those are wooden tongue-and-groove boards we're about to smash. They were as hard as rock. "Seasoned" Dad said. "Old," I said. I wish I could have re-used them, but I beat them silly and they're resting outside in the dumpster.

Last shot (click to enlarge!) is the finished product. The goal was to open the space and create a natural flow between the kitchen and the dining room. So there's now a 14" high by 144" wide header where there used to be a wall. Mission accomplished?

In the background of the second and third shots, you can see the results of our adventures last week: lots of new sheet rock and lots of dried gypsum mud. There used to be painfully red wood panels back there. They hurt Cindy's eyes. They made me almost sterile. But now they're gone. Never to see the light of day again.

I diced up the sheet rock. Dad did the electrical action. We both did the demo and carted off the scraps. Not bad for a weekend's work.

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