And The Walls Came Tumbling Down!

If you didn’t catch the “before” start HERE. The day we closed on our home just so happened to be a Friday… so the very next day we started ripping it apart! The demo continued over the next couple of weeks with lots of help from friends and family. (PS, please excuse my cell-phone quality pictures… I wasn’t about to pull out my “fancy” camera in this mess!) It’s probably super confusing trying to figure out the goal from just the pics, but here’s how we want to change the floor plan:

Round 1: Kitchen & Windows!

We started off our first day of demo by taking down the cabinets in the kitchen. Lots of family came by to help keep things moving! My mom worked on chipping the tiles off: I originally thought I could salvage them & give away on craigslist, but they didn’t come off well enough so we ended up throwing them all out – thanks anyways mom! Both of my grandmas & my sister Jaci did some serious window cleaning – the level of dirt & what i think was mold needed to be cleaned up asap so we could open the windows and air out the house. By the end of our first Saturday we had most the windows cleaned & the kitchen cleared!

Round 2: Bye Bye Drywall

This was the only day I brought the girls… before things got too messy! They played wonderfully while I ripped up the kitchen

I got the first round of drywall down with the girls nearby, but moving forward was too messy to keep them on the job site. My family continued to stop by and help at different times which was amazing! We got all the paneling and drywall removed around the den, but we couldn’t remove the studs until the electrical was professionally removed and an engineer could verify what was load bearing.

After the den was as demo’d as far as we could take it, I started to try and remove the soffits on my own. Eventually I had to call my dad to the rescue and he helped saw them off the walls. He also helped score the drywall along the ceiling so we didn’t damage the ceiling drywall while we knocked down the walls! My sister’s boyfriend James and our brother Josh also came by at various times to help.

During the demo process we also found an old news paper from 1968! Pretty cool.

Round 3: Finishing up the drywall removal + clean up

We had to write notes on all the walls all over the house to help everyone remember which walls/drywall were staying and what needed to come down! Wes removed the drywall around the closets in between the new master and girls’ room so we could expand that space, and everyone helped finish prepping the den and half bath so we could reframe those areas for an open kitchen/living space and new laundry room.

Round 4: Scraping the “popcorn” ceilings”

After doing our research, we found the best way to go after popcorn ceilings is to first saturate them with water, let it sit about 5 minutes, then scrape it off. This worked really well on most the ceilings, but there were a couple that gave us trouble. The experts in my family informed me this was probably because the easy ceilings hadn’t been painted over, whereas the hard ones had. Fun fact of the day for ya! You might also notice we left all the carpet padding down until we were done with the ceilings – this way we could just roll up the yuckiness and not cause extra work.