progress

Three weeks ago, Ben finally had a day off. I lit a fire under his behind to get working on the baby room. He set out to demolish the walls, which were previously that lovely 70's-ish wood paneling covered by layers and layers of colored paint. We originally thought he'd have to replace all four walls, but there is only one wall (north) that he discovered he had to re-do.

From the outside of our ancient house, you can clearly see that there used to be a door that leads to this bedroom. We knew it was covered from the inside. However, when Ben began to demolish the north wall, he found not only the door, but also a random window that had been covered up AND the house's original wall.

Two weeks ago: The last owners not only covered the door (incorrectly, I might add) and the window, but they covered what seems to be a perfectly good sheet rock wall with insulation and the gaggy wood paneling. The wall around the door was covered in mold and you could clearly see a wide gap between the door and wall where water and other weather elements had made their way inside.

Ben spent several hours that first day ripping stuff down off the walls, chipping up the original tile flooring that he discovered under the carpet, and coughing dust of all sorts. Later that week, my oh-so-handy father-in-law came over to help haul all the wood, carpet, and junk out of the room.

Together, Ben and his dad have been working on the room a bit at a time for a few nights each week. Here are some things they discovered:
- The floor around the door was rotted. The step on the outside of the door was rotted. Obviously, the wall was rotted.
- After lifting up the rotted floor board, they found the crawl space...which was filled with all sorts of junk, ie old car parts, old furnace bits, tin cans, and more.
- The geniuses who re-did the room before us put all of the electrical on the outside of the original wall; there are electrical wires everywhere.

Thursday, they basically ripped out the whole north wall, including the door and old window. They quit working around 9:30, telling me that they kept finding more and more problems so they were going to call it quits for the night.

Yesterday the floor was replaced and fixed, kind of as a surprise to Ben, who disovered his dad and brother came over at 1:30 to begin work while both of us were gone. They 'broke in' by opening the crawl space door and popped into the room by lifting up the temporary flooring. By the time Ben and I got home around 6:30, the floor and all the rotten parts of it were done:

After working all night last night, the north wall looks like this:
They completely took out the door, replaced the wall, and framed a whole new window (that window, by the way, was just chillin' in our backyard when we moved in...it was an almost perfect fit to the pre existing window).

The next step to getting the room finished will be to fill in this wall with insulation & sheet rock. Ben's brother began smoothing out the original wall on the east; the south wall will just need to be painted; the west wall has a hole to patch and then also just needs paint. I picked out the paint last week...a really, really pale green, which matches perfectly the crib bedding my mom bought for us. We now have the crib & changing table at our house, along with an ever-growing accumulation of baby gifts (though most from my shower last week are at my mom's since we literally have no room for them). I somewhat see a light at the end of a tunnel. I don't know when it will be complete, but when a Hubert boy begins a project like this, it will get done very quickly because they are all so handy.