Josh the Destroyer

Ever since we first started looking at houses to buy last year, Josh made it his mission in every house we looked at to imagine ways in which he could tear out a wall or two.  Necessary or not, the man wanted to demolish something.  "We don't really need that wall, do we?... You know, if we took out that wall there, it would really open up this space... I don't like the way this looks,  should probably just remove it..."  And so on and so forth.

Last week, he finally got his wish.

First off, we have this massive office room in the new house that was converted from the original garage.  It's a great space, but when we got the house this room was covered with nasty old wood paneling, and had really awful ceiling tiles.  The built-in shelves were not terrible, but in order to remove the paneling behind them, the shelves had to come out too.  In a matter of hours, this room went from this:

To this:

And the ceiling came down in one fell swoop, like this:

In the next few weeks we hope to finish this room with new sheetrock all around, and eventually we'll rebuild some of the built-in shelving (but probably not the whole wall of it) for office purposes.  The closet at the far end may or may not get re-built, we haven't decided yet.  My plan is to also have a corner of this room for bike storage, with a standing bike rack and some shelving for our gear.  Eventually I would love to have an extra exterior window or two in this room, but I think that is a project that will have to be put on the back burner until some other more pressing things can get finished.

Josh was pretty happy with himself after tearing apart the office.  And THEN he got to work on the real demolition project.

It's hard to explain without actually seeing the house, but we have this big huge bathroom in the middle of the house which used to actually be a bedroom.  Because of it's former function, this bathroom had a huge walk-in closet attached to it.  One of the walls of this big closet was shared by a nook in the hallway out of the kitchen, and this space was where the previous homeowners had kept their washer/dryer and water heater.  We decided that by removing the wall between the laundry nook and the closet, and closing off the closet door in the bathroom, we could create a very nice, open laundry room.  Thus, last week Josh got to tear out a wall.  I wasn't there when it happened, but I can only imagine there was a decent bit of evil laughter between sledgehammer swings.

This was the hallway nook, previously used for the appliances:

Here's what a wall looks like after you knock it down:

And here is how this space looks right now:

(As of today the loose stuff has all been cleaned up and the jagged bits of walls are now flush- 

so really, it looks like a real room!)

This is still very much a work-in-progress, but hopefully you can get an idea of how much space we've created by removing the wall.  The pipes all need to be rerouted to the back wall and walls obviously need to be patched up and re-plastered   We're going to replace the water heater with one of the new, small tankless heaters and this room will be tiled with the same Saltillo as the kitchen.  I'm hoping to find a decent deal a nice front-loading washer/dryer, and I'll engineer some nice cabinets or something once we get the appliances in there.  I'll update on the laundry room project when we have it closer to being done.  And of course, the floor tiling project will be a doozy.  Stay tuned for that one.