It was more than a little unnerving to have a door to nowhere right off the master bedroom, particularly since one day it actually swung open during a windstorm. As a result, last weekend saw the removal (and subsequent – and continuing – renovation) of the dreaded door.
Our first fun discovery, which we should have expected, was this:
Yep, that lovely sandy paint was actually applied over wallpaper. Who’s surprised? No one? Okay.
The door came out super easy and within an hour, we were left with a nice big hole in our master bedroom and our second discovery – completely soaked wood under the door frame. Yeah, that crappy door and deck had been allowing water into the plywood subfloor so Scott circular-sawed out that piece since it was going to be replaced with a fresh new two by four.
Woo! Then we had to go to a birthday party so Scott and my dad propped up a sheet of plywood and off we went.
Want to know what the outside looked like? Scott finally got the rest of the deck wood off the house, too.
Let’s cut to 6:30p on Saturday – the fun really began! P.S. I say “we” a lot, but really Scott and my dad did all of the work.
We (this one is me and Scott) had done a ton of research about closing in doors. The prevailing wisdom was that we needed to close in the hole with studs, cover the outside with plywood or OSB sheathing, then insulate and drywall the inside. Easy peasy (again, remember, I wasn’t doing any of this).
The first step went really fast. I had to run out to Ace and by the time I got back 45 minutes later, the thing was framed in.
The plywood, on the other hand, took quite a bit longer since the door is on the second story and it’s really hard to hold heavy plywood up to the wall, nail it in, and not fall off your ladder. In the end, Scott had to finish off the nailing on Sunday and the board isn’t quite flush (but that will be fixed once the super secret project occurs).
I was ecstatic that the hole was gone! Then came the dirty part – drywall.
That’s the great plastic sheet we hung to protect our bed and clothes. No way we were going to move all that furniture somewhere else. We are, however, temporarily displaced into the guest room.
Although Scott swore he’d never drywall again after the den, we figured out we only needed three to four pieces to do the whole wall, which means not only did we get rid of the wallpaper/paint fiasco on one of four walls, but Scott also has significantly less joint compounding to do (look at the ragged drywall above and tell me patching that would be easier than taping and skimming).
This is the last picture I got since Scott is currently working on taping, mudding, scraping, and generally putting our wall back together.
For anyone counting, this project (and room) were actually not on our priority list at all for the near future. In fact, it was so far down the list that I’m still in disbelief that we’re tackling it. In the end, though, I’ll be SO excited to cross it off.
