It’s been a long time since I took a sledgehammer to anything 🙂 But this past Friday night while Chris’s sister listened to the girl’s monitors after they fell asleep, Chris and I headed over to the new house and did just that 🙂

When we got there we discovered that nearly none of the lights worked in the office (since then Chris has figured things out), so we had to do our demo by work light. Not ideal, but hey, it worked.

Remember this ridiculous brick pony wall that separated the back of the room?

Welp, it went bye bye thanks to my 7 years of playing baseball. I took a sledgehammer to that mofo and about 5 minutes later it was down, hooray! Chris was working on installing some utility shelving in the basement while I was going to town, but when he came back I was a little tired from my sledgehammer adventures so he ripped down the cabinets

Like how we had to work by work light? Yeah, that sucked. Something is all fucked up with some of the lights in the house, so we need to address that as well. But at least the work light is powerful so it actually wasn’t too bad. Little by little though we got there

It took about 60 minutes for us to get from start to finish, which isn’t too bad at all

And this past weekend CBH came over to help out and actually hauled ALLLLLL the bricks up to the front of the house and into the dumpster on the driveway. So that was super awesome. And then we got the rest of it cleaned up on Monday night (another late night date working while family listened to the girl’s monitors)

Along this back wall we’ll install the washer and dryer. The hookups are currently in the garage, but we don’t want to take up valuable floor space in the garage, and this seemed like the best option. Certainly it’s not ideal to have the washer and dryer in an office, but this room is so fucking big (over 500 square feet) that I don’t mind as much. This room will sort of function in 3 ways – living area, office and utility space. It’s big enough to take on all 3 tasks, so it’s okay. And, honestly, we’re very informal people, I don’t really care too much.

The question is what to do about the flooring. We’re getting the furnace replaced, and all the ducting has asbestos, which obviously needs to be remediated. The floor tiles in here have asbestos as well, so we asked the company how much it would cost to remove these tiles as well right now (something we would want to do eventually anyway). The price wasn’t too bad ($1500 for the ducting, $3500 for the tiles as well in this room as well as our bedroom underneath the god awful carpet). We decided to just bundle it all together and get it done now. That is actually happening today. Hooray!

The flooring in the bedroom will be carpet (which we picked out this weekend)

The measure was yesterday and we’re not sure about install yet. But for the time being (probably 2 weeks) we’ll just put our bed in the office while we wait for the carpet to be installed. We made sure to get a really nice pad because this room is sitting on a concrete slab, so we want to make sure it doesn’t feel like that.

We thought we would want carpet in the office too, but once the pony wall was down I really liked the idea of one continuous flooring throughout the space because the room feels so much more open now. And obviously carpet is not so great with the appliances. And there’s also a door to the backyard in this room and so that would constantly be getting dirty. Hardwood? Laminate? Something more industrial? We’re not sure. So we’ve decided that we’ll live with the concrete subloor until we decide (and have the money to buy) the flooring we really want.