Demo Day!

It's too cold to go camping this week.  Days in the 40's and nights in the 20's. There were even a few snowflakes yesterday.  So we will stay home and work on projects ... INDOORS! 

This week is finally the week to see what is what with the big demolition on the wall in our living room. This double wide doorway had been reduced down to a single door size in the past. It was time now to remove it! 

If you look at a couple blog posts back, Steve found a beautiful set of French doors to put in this space. He has always wanted to remove this temporary single door and the foot wide walls around it. The first step was to remove the heavy wooden single door that was in the added door frame. He removed it carefully off of the hinges and stored it in the garage. We will see if our kids might need it for their cabin, otherwise we will put it on Facebook Marketplace and see if anybody wants to buy it. As a last resort, we will drop it off at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore and they can deal with it.

Now comes the really fun "discovery" part. Steve is removing the trim and the framework from the single doorway. Piece by piece, he removed it carefully without cracking anything. That way the trim and the frame can be reused with the single door in the future.

Well well well, look at this. When they built the little temporary walls on each side to reduce the doorway size, they built them right on top of some carpeting! Why on Earth would someone do that? But, it's a really good thing they did it, because that means it might be easier to restore or repair the hardwood flooring underneath???

Steve removed the drywall, section by section. He carried it right out to the front porch and kept stacking it into a large trash can so we had the least amount of mess possible. I kept the vacuum cleaner and the broom and dustpan busy, cleaning up the mess so it didn't spread around the house. In the pic below, you can still see the bedroom furniture all intact in the background. I wanted to keep the mess down as much as possible during this de-construction phase.

After he pulled the studs and framework away, we could clearly see the two hunks of carpet left behind on the hardwood floor. They stick into the room about 12 inches on each side into the doorway.

Amazingly, much to our surprise, we discovered that there had never been original French doors in this doorway! There is no evidence of ANY type of door hinges or latches or swinging door or anything in this opening.  Not even a suspended curtain across it. I guess originally it had just been a wide-open doorway. We can only assume that it was closed off long ago to a single private door to make this room into a bedroom. The house was turned into a rental home in the 1970's after the Heise family built a new home out of town.  It was possibly a parlor or den or even a diningroom in its original state?

At one time the woodwork must have been all stained and varnished a darker brown.  Oh how we wish it still was!  But to strip and restore all of the woodwork in the house is wayyyyy too time consuming.  Plus, it never looks as good as the original would have been. Instead, we will caulk the nail holes, sand it down, and give it a new coat of paint to freshen it up before we install the doors.

We carefully peeled up the 2 pieces of old carpeting. Some of it was stuck to the floor, but most of it came off intact. Amazingly, underneath the wood is all in really good shape. No replacement patching or weaving in replacement boards needed. Whew!  I will put some putty in the 2 nail holes where the walls were secured. Just a little bit of light sanding to clean it up and a coat of poly should bring it all back to its original beauty.  Hopefully I can disguise it so it doesn't even look like there'd ever been a temporary wall built over it. I had done some pretty good work with the stain on the floor where we have replaced some hardwood pieces in the kitchen, and I hope to do the same here as well.

Now I thought we were done for the day. That was a pretty big project. Steve hauled away all of the extra pieces of wood and the garbage can full of drywall. I cleaned up (again) and vacuumed everything and dusted things down.

Were we done? Nope! 

Mr. Zoom Zoom decided it was time to swap around the contents of the guest bedroom and our smaller office room. That meant I needed to remove absolutely everything off the large bookcase before we could move it. So now I filled up the dining room, a stack at a time, taking everything off of my shelves. I was trying to keep it organized as best as possible. But you can see from this picture, it was crazy!  He just kept cracking the whip to Git Er Dun! 

We removed the full size bed out of the guest room and the end tables and lamps etc. The only thing we left was the barrister bookcase that we had moved in there the week before. There is still a steamer trunk in an alcove underneath the front window. And the rug. 

Steve brought in the furniture dolly and we carefully put the heavy bookcase on top of it. This thing is really heavy. It was left here by the previous owners in the garage. I had painted it up and used it as an office bookcase when we moved in.  It just fit on the wall in the smaller office off the diningroom. We rolled it effortlessly with the dolly into the bigger room. We then decided the best location for it is on the long eastern wall. 

Once we got the bookcase settled into place, Steve moved some of the artwork up higher on the wall. Granddaughter Chelsea and I had spent an intricate time using a laser leveler to hang these original paintings in a row a few months ago. They are spring, summer, fall and winter. So now we had to move each one up another 16 inches to clear the bookcase and still make them look nice. Steve is good,---he did it by eye and using a carpenter level instead of the laser level that we used.

Now that the bookcase was moved over, it was time to start hauling things from the dining room and reloading it again. Steve helped carry each load from the diningroom. This time I bought little fabric square cubes from the DollarTree store. They were only a dollar each, and able to help sort out some of the clutter and make it visually appealing. I took up my little Dyno label maker, throwback from the 70s, and made little labels for each bin.

They are not the sturdiest bins in the world, but for a dollar each, they will do. The shelves are only 10.5 inches high, and the more expensive and more well-made ones at other stores are 11 or 12 inches. Maybe somewhere down the line I will find some really pretty woven baskets of the 10 inch height to invest in. For the meantime, this will suffice. 

I got all of the things stacked back up onto the shelves. It's amazing how much stuff you have, even in a small little office. We moved the mattress and box spring from the guest room over into the little office.  We are planning to do some other stuff to the walls in there, so we didn't set the bed up. We just stacked it against the wall for now.  Soon I had all the small office stuff moved over into the new larger office. This is why we needed the extra room. We have an antique office chair, but we don't have a desk yet.  I have a really good idea in mind. I will save that for a future blog.

So far so good,

we can now stop for the day. 

Whew! 

We have to wait a little while for the installation of the two French doors. We had to order some special swing away offset hinges because of the configuration of the door frame. Down on the bottom near the mop boards there is what's called a "plinth block" that necessitates it to swing even wider for the door to clear the plinth. The special hinges would take care of the situation. They are not carried in the local stores, so we had to order them.  This is the plinth block and see how it's wider than the door frame?

We decided to go with the oil rubbed bronze color that will match with our darker furniture, the table lamp, and the fireplace screen in the livingroom. These are the hinges that are set to swing the door out wider and hold it away where it swings into the open position. They are often used for people needing to widen doorways for wheelchair access. They should be here within the week.

On the French doors, there is a drilled hole opening for a doorknob. Steve said we need to think about what kind of door knob we are going to get. Well, an original door between our master bedroom and bathroom has this beautiful glass door knob. The rest had all been replaced with modern brushed nickel ones. I said someday I would like to find more of those glass door knobs for all of the doors in our house. I just love the old-fashioned look of them, plus I like the elegance.

We looked around online and I was hoping to find something with the oil rubbed bronze finish on the metal backplate part behind the crystal door knob. On Amazon, I found these really beautiful oval crystal knobs with the most interesting shaped backplate, sometimes called the rosette. They are absolutely stunning! They had a lot of good reviews and the seller offers them in combinations of one or five.

Steve said, why should we just order one? If you order all 5 you get a better price. And then we can do all of the doors in the house! Well, not the one special door between the master bedroom and bathroom. We will leave that original. So we ordered all 5 and they should be here next week too. How exciting!

I even found some smaller cabinet type knobs to match. Those we ordered for on the bifold closet doors and the cabinet in the bathroom too.  Now it will all coordinate.  Can't you tell, I like "Matchy-Matchy" stuff?

It's good that we kinda put a hold on construction things right now.  Steve is coming down with an awful head and sinus cold.  He is getting progressively worse since yesterday, and today he will hang out in his jammies and take it easy.  Although, he did jump up and grab a tape measure when I told him about my desk "idea"...  But we can't tackle that until I get in a shopping trip to Marinette to the fabric store. Hmmmmm?    You will just have to wait and see.