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Spare Bedroom Renovation
The house was built in the 19teens, so a smidge over 100 years old. There were a bunch of renovations in the 1970's or 1980's, combining two bedrooms and a bathroom into one master bedroom and a large bathroom, and covering the walls of the remaining bedroom with light-blue faux-wood-grain paneling, which we've ripped down over the past year or so. And now things have kicked into high gear.
As of Tuesday evening, the room looked like this:
The desk was still in the room, but everything was off the top of it, and I'd confirmed with the contractors that they could throw a cover over it and work around it. Two filing cabinets full of sheet music and paper records are temporarily in the master bedroom (replacing two medievaloid chairs that are now in the attic). The spare bed has been disassembled, with the mattress standing up in the master bedroom and the rest of the parts in the attic. A thousand books or so are now in boxes in the garage.
On Wednesday morning, the contractors showed up and started ripping out plaster
and the acoustical-tile ceiling
On Thursday, they took apart the "closet" (which we've been using as a bookcase for the past nineteen years)
Look in the corner: there's what looks like the outline of an old doorway, and the other side of the wall there is plywood rather than plaster. But would anybody have built a bedroom doorway 18" wide?
They also took down the plaster ceiling:
Note the spongelike "insulation" between the wall studs.
Somewhere in the course of Thursday's banging (or perhaps Wednesday's), they did some damage to the other side of the wall: the rectangular outline you see is the aforementioned plywood where there (perhaps) used to be a door.
They assure me they'll fix this, especially if we still have matching paint. Which of course we don't -- we painted that shortly after moving in, around Christmas 2001.
And one of the three outside walls has bricks in between the studs, while the other two walls are just wood-frame. Huh? Except that it's brick only up to about head-height, as though the bricklayer had lost interest or run out of bricks or something. Huh?
(BTW, my next door neighbors who have an extremely similar house say that when they renovated their master bedroom last year, they too found one brick wall. Huh?)
Another shot of the peculiar doorways. I'm not sure if you can see this, but 18" away from the corner is a door strike plate, facing away from the corner and towards the current door.
Which suggests that Door 1 was in the corner, 18" wide; Door 2 was 18" away from the corner, of some unknown width; and the current door is Door 3, another foot away from the corner. Or maybe there have only been two doors, but when Door 1 was removed, they pulled off the strip that had the strike plate, then changed their minds and put it back on pointing the other direction, then changed their minds again and put the new door a foot away so the strike plate was no longer relevant, but didn't bother taking it off again. Or something.
As of Tuesday evening, the room looked like this:
The desk was still in the room, but everything was off the top of it, and I'd confirmed with the contractors that they could throw a cover over it and work around it. Two filing cabinets full of sheet music and paper records are temporarily in the master bedroom (replacing two medievaloid chairs that are now in the attic). The spare bed has been disassembled, with the mattress standing up in the master bedroom and the rest of the parts in the attic. A thousand books or so are now in boxes in the garage.
On Wednesday morning, the contractors showed up and started ripping out plaster
and the acoustical-tile ceiling
On Thursday, they took apart the "closet" (which we've been using as a bookcase for the past nineteen years)
Look in the corner: there's what looks like the outline of an old doorway, and the other side of the wall there is plywood rather than plaster. But would anybody have built a bedroom doorway 18" wide?
They also took down the plaster ceiling:
Note the spongelike "insulation" between the wall studs.
Somewhere in the course of Thursday's banging (or perhaps Wednesday's), they did some damage to the other side of the wall: the rectangular outline you see is the aforementioned plywood where there (perhaps) used to be a door.
They assure me they'll fix this, especially if we still have matching paint. Which of course we don't -- we painted that shortly after moving in, around Christmas 2001.
And one of the three outside walls has bricks in between the studs, while the other two walls are just wood-frame. Huh? Except that it's brick only up to about head-height, as though the bricklayer had lost interest or run out of bricks or something. Huh?
(BTW, my next door neighbors who have an extremely similar house say that when they renovated their master bedroom last year, they too found one brick wall. Huh?)
Another shot of the peculiar doorways. I'm not sure if you can see this, but 18" away from the corner is a door strike plate, facing away from the corner and towards the current door.
Which suggests that Door 1 was in the corner, 18" wide; Door 2 was 18" away from the corner, of some unknown width; and the current door is Door 3, another foot away from the corner. Or maybe there have only been two doors, but when Door 1 was removed, they pulled off the strip that had the strike plate, then changed their minds and put it back on pointing the other direction, then changed their minds again and put the new door a foot away so the strike plate was no longer relevant, but didn't bother taking it off again. Or something.