Bustin' Down The Wall

Remember our bathroom disaster that is currently unfolding?  Well, we’re in a waiting period in there because it needs to dry out before we can do much else with it.  We have a lot of stuff we need to do in there and as we were thinking, brainstorming, and generally feeling frustrated about the bathroom, we got a fantastic idea…it was high time we took a sledge hammer to the house and ripped out the most frustrating feature of our house.

Give up?

We laid into the laundry room with vengeance.  I was so tired of the lack of flow in that room and it’s the first room we come home into, so while we’re waiting on water to dry upstairs, we’re getting down to business down stairs.

Biggest problem of the room, right here.  The door straight ahead goes to the garage, the door on the left is for a small closet, and the door on the right goes to the kitchen.  They are all big doors and they are all in the way of each other.  Not to mention how small the room feels.  We have 9 foot ceilings in here too, but it doesn’t feel like it because the room is so claustrophobic.

Enter a plan, stage right.

Closet is coming OUT.

First, we removed the honkin’ laundry sink.  We love our laundry sink, just not in our laundry room.  It’s way to big for the small room.  This guy is being relocated to the basement for brush washing, etc.

I’m ready to smack the first celebratory hole in the wall, look out world!  Don’t worry, we know that the best way to demolish something is not to pull it down piece by piece with a hammer, I just really wanted to hit it.

We took the trim off the door framing, not sure when/if/why we might need it again, but it’s in good shape, so we pulled it off nicely and took it downstairs.

Yeah, we realized here how dusty it would be…we went and got our masks.  However, we took the reciprocating saw  and score around the studs and peeled most of the sheet rock off in decent size chunks.

Once the Sheetrock was all cleaned off, we nicely took apart the studs.  It’s worth noting that this wall was in no way load bearing…but if you aren’t sure, be sure to check before you start pulling stuff down.

We did surprising little damage to the Sheetrock we want to keep, so that was good news, some patching and we should be back in business!

View from the back corner.

View from the peninsula.

I had a really hard time capturing how much more open and bright the room feels (because it is still not much square footage), but we are excited about the progress so far and ready to move on to the next phase!  Patching and fixing the wall and floor so we can move into the fun part — building some shelves and organization!!

Anybody else bust anything up this weekend?!?  I have a new found love of demolition….

**Update: If you are thinking of demo-ing a similar wall and are interested in the process we followed, this is what we did: identify the Sheetrock we want to keep in tact, score the edges with a utility knife between the “coming down Sheetrock” and the “save it Sheetrock ”, cut to the studs with reciprocating saw and take out large pieces of the Sheetrock.  After the Sheetrock was down, we took apart the studs carefully so we didn’t ruin the Sheetrock (again…be careful of what you don’t want to demolish)…and that was it, some quick clean-up and we were in business.**

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