What We Did On My Three-Day Weekend

"What you guys might want to do . . ." was all our contractor had to say to us. The next day, we followed through on his suggestion and had the north wall of the laundry room sundered right down to the studs. How easily led we can be. This will save them precious time, when they move the plumbing for the washing machine to inside the north wall, providing a nice, neat, discrete home for all those pipes.

As you can see from the pictures (above and side), this had been an outside wall at one time. There was aluminum siding, to begin with. After we figured out how these little babies interlocked, it came apart fairly easily (hopefully, we’ll be able to reuse the siding when we turn the upstairs door back into a window. Just past the layer of aluminum was foil-backed paper with a shiny side towards the house. When this tore off, it unveiled the original clapboard siding. It looked so cute! But it had to go. Nothing our big Christmas hammers couldn’t handle.

It was about this time that Brother Rob called and wondered if we were working at the house. I had to go into another room to hear him above the hammering from the laundry room as Rob pried off piece after piece of the siding. "Uh, yeah, we’re working!" I said. "Say, our contractor suggested we take out a wall down to the studs. I’m not sure if we’ll need any special tools to pull this off, but it might be a good idea to bring whatever you can think of."

Thankfully, he brought his reciprocating saw. Had we not have had that, we would have been stuck right after we got the clapboard siding off. There underneath those brittle, old, thin strips of siding were some hefty 12-inch cedar sheathing boards. With the reciprocating saw, Rob was able to cut right up to the last stud before the wall. The saw cutting into the old cedar made the room smell like camping in the mountains. With the help of our Christmas pry bars, Rob and I were able to wrestle the sheathing boards off the studs. Behind every board were pockets of insulation. There was blown-in insulation packing every nook and cranny. I gotta say this, they did a good job insulating that house. For just this one, small wall, we ended up hauling out four big trash bags full of insulation. The old clapboards were not salvageable, but that cedar sheathing will make for some dandy lumber to have on hand.

After lunch, it was time for Rob and I to get serious about how the spice cabinet (a.k.a., old medicine cabinet) was going to be installed into the hole where the superfluous window used to be.

By this time, Brother Rob had gone off into the refinishing room to work on boards and listen to a basketball game on the radio. Rob and I stood at the hole in the wall pondering what should be our first move. Our confusion must have been palpable, because Brother Rob walked back into the kitchen, suggested a plan of action, and then went back to his refinishing (and basketball).

Now that we had a plan, we were off and running (follow side pictures). We had enough 2X4's left over from a project last summer to handle it. We first framed in the old window opening, giving the sheetrock something to attach to. Then, we put a board going across the bottom at just the height we want the spice cabinet to hang on the wall. We supported that board with three cripples (another new term for me).

We were trying to get the spice cabinet centered with the hole in the wall when Bro Rob came in to point out what should have been, well, OBVIOUS – "You know, you don’t really have to have it centered with where the window went. You’re going to put sheet rock around it anyway, no one would notice."

"I like it when you walk into the room," Rob said. To which, Bro Rob went back to his refinishing project.

We set the spice cabinet as close to the center of the wall as we could. We ran a 2X4 along its north side, boxing it in. Now, it won’t actually be installed until I get it stained, which could be anytime between now and Halloween.

Rob was in the mood for more destruction, so he took out the door that goes from the bathroom into the middle room. We had planned on sealing off this door, since having three doors going into a bathroom seemed to heighten the, shall we say, "surprise potential?" Rob took off the door and trim boards, carefully labeling them after laying them out in the middle of the dining room like some chalk outline of a murder victim.

All of these projects took us through to the end of the afternoon, and it was time to close up shop for another day. As I said, everyone has been getting involved with this project; and, tonight, we had Sister Deb’s famous crock-pot soup recipe (see side picture) to look forward to. (And was it ever YUMMY!)

Have I mentioned that the weather has been miserable? The next day was gray – and not even a pretty gray at that! The wind cut through you like saw blades. We knew this for a fact, because we decided to be one of twelve people out on the road to join the other fifteen people at our favorite Big-Box Store. There were so few customers there, not only did employees actually ask us if we needed help, but the ones that weren’t sitting comatose in front of their computer screens were doing anything to keep busy. I actually saw one guy dusting the parquet floor display! ("Toekick" was there. She was busy, as always. I hoped that she had breakfast, at least.)

When we left our beloved Big-Box, ice was falling from the sky as if dispensed through a shaker. We wanted nothing more than to get back to our home(s) and, oh yes, to have it be the middle of June, if it wasn’t too much trouble.

I spent most of Sunday refinishing boards and finishing up the door I had started earlier in the week. Rob donned his dust mask and insulated around the window frames in the kitchen. "I can see all the way to the outside," he hollered to me in the muffled tones that we’re used to communicating in. The dust masks and respirators give a haunting, otherworldly timbre to our voices. (Not to mention, it also makes me look like Darth Vader.) Since most of the window sash cords have long been broken, we’ve decided to just stuff as much insulation into the cavities normally reserved for the window weights (thereby restricting the viewing area to the actual glass portion of the window).

I was able to finish one door, Sunday. Both sides, I might add. It was the first door I tackled, and I thought I’d play it safe with making it a closet door. As you can see (side picture), it didn’t turn out too bad. I picked up a product at our Big-Box Store that did an especially dandy job of cleaning up the residue the paint stripper leaves behind. When I talked to Dad later that evening and mentioned the product, he told me he used something similar for the final clean-up job – paintbrush cleaner! Since I can get that by the gallons for the same price I paid for a 16-oz. bottle of the other stuff, I’m pretty sure I’ll be making the switch to the paintbrush cleaner.

For his final act of destruction for the weekend, Rob removed the bathroom sink that clung to the wall opposite le toilet. We cleaned up the work site, carefully worked our way down the front steps caked with snow and ice, and headed back to our house across the street – where a hot shower and plenty of leftover vegetable soup awaited us.