Bedroom Prep, Closet Demo Part 1

October 27, 2018

Today, Liz and Bob were working upstairs in the master bedroom and I was working on taking out the closet on the first floor.

We spent the morning chatting over coffee and pastries, reviewing what our priorities for the house were. A few months ago, we were working on trying to chase the cold, aiming to get a lot of demo, taping, and dust out of the way before installing our new furnace. Given the timing of things, switching out the furnace seems a task more for post-winter.

We’re still making our bedroom the top priority, but the urgency to move up there has lessened. We’ve gotten a bit more breathing room, now that we’re not trying to get a whole sequence of things completed before December rolls in.

With the demo of the downstairs closet, we needed a place to store all our coats/jackets.

My office for the day.

A lot of old shelves.

Brief selfie – something I rarely do. I had completely forgotten that there was a mirror on the back of this door.

Slow work, shelves out of the way.

The drywall was very new (the whole closet was something put in recently). And so I was able to remove a lot of it by hand, just pulling it off the wall.

Unlke plaster, this stuff wasn’t overly dusty. The one drawback was that in removing it, I got a lot of large pieces that I had to break down.

Most of the drywall came off in jagged chunks, and that ended up poking a lot of holes into the contractor bags. As soon as I got a bag filled, I ended up wanting to run it outside into a bin, for fear it would split and dump debris everywhere.

An old business card, found in the closet. Check out that phone number!

An old slide. I wonder if these things slipped down from upstairs, from behind the fireplace?

There’s a handwritten number (either ‘9 or 19), which may just be a number for the slide. But an embedded date in the slide itself gives us a clue as to the time: MAY 89.

This is what I could make out on the slide, after holding it up to the work lights.

Slide detail. I believe someone cut out a photo of the prior occupant, Rita Nessman… and placed her face on a famous painting. Take a look at the old photo we found behind the fireplace as a reference.

I believe the painting here is Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando), by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

I love that this bit of technology represents a very early, old school kind of Photoshop attempt. This seems like a really funny slide, and I’d love to see the other images from the rest of the slideshow.

Upstairs, Bob installed backerboard all along the base of the bedroom – a big help for when we install trim.

Meanwhile, Liz was working on finishing up the remaining insulation. A ton of measuring and cutting. One of the things I remember her saying was “I hate triangles!” because check out all that stuff on the top right there.