Rehabber’s Rehab

Liz is off downstate pretending that a massive earthquake has hit southern Illinois.

This gives me the great opportunity to get dirty and make a mess!

First I finished up the master bedroom closet.  I finished the steaming of the wallpaper.  The top half, thankfully went a lot quicker.  I then spackled some of the plaster that was raw and sanded for two days.  Then I primed and painted, It isn’t immaculate, but its clean and plain white.  Now if I can just get Liz to actually put her clothes in the closet rather than on the floor.  But to her credit, we are in need of a large dresser, all for her of course.  I’m relegated to an old dresser in the back bedroom.

Ink was a great help painting the closet.  But like any painter he got a little on him.  He didn’t appreciate the cleaning I gave him.  I’m afraid his whisker may be white from now on.

But back to the messy part. 

The first day Liz was gone, I took down the bathroom wall.  Earlier Matt and Dad built the new wall that will be the new exterior of the bathroom encroaching on the dining room.  So all I had to do was demo the old bathroom wall to capture that new space and get the full size of remodeled bedroom adding about 30% of square footage to the bathroom.  But I had to maintain the thin wall that backed our current tub so that we could keep using it throughout the construction.

The demo went real well, I sawsawed sixteen inch vertical sections of the wall so that the pieces would come down easily.  The studs came out cleanly and I was able to maintain the thin wall for the old tub.  Now the room is ready for us to put our plumbing wall in that will divide the closet from the tub and hold all of the new shower’s plumbing.

Ink again was surprisingly helpful.  He jumped into the mess wholeheartedly.  Alas he was covered in dust and looked like he had aged ten years.

Today I’m tackling the block wall that divides the sunroom and the kitchen.  Ideally I would have a mason’s chop saw to cut into the block, but I’m going to give it a go with a chisel and hammer like a stone artist of demolition.  Getting down the heavy blocks will allow us to go ahead with finishing the maple kitchen floor with little risk that it would be damaged from the blocks if we were to do the floors before taking down the wall.

Also on tap for today is replacing the old phone wire with Cat-5 wire.  AT&T came out to check on our slow service and told us the speed of our service is limited by the old wire.

Time to get back to the fun.