It’s took 117 days from the day I made my initial offer, but it’s done. I finally closed on this place Friday, so it is officially mine. So to celebrate, like most good homeowners, I bolted and went to Iowa for the Iowa vs Michigan game Saturday night. Had a great time by the way. 6-0, who would have thought.
I got the work started on Sunday, did some needed cleaning of the bathroom, changed the toilet seat, yes I know this is all very exciting. Then the real fun started, the demo. So far in a little over two days I’ve pulled enough crap out of this place to fill what looks like a quarter of the enormous dumpster that showed up yesterday. It’s mostly filled with sweet wood paneling that was so popular a long time ago.
This place has been quite amazing. As far as I can tell none of the previous owners liked to take anything out when they would remodel. Nope, they just build on top of it. The typical wall (inside to outside) in this house goes like this: studs, old drywall, few layers of paint (pretty normal so far), then anywhere from what seems like 18-20 layers of various patterns of contact paper, then for good measure, they throw a few layers of that sweet aforementioned paneling.
The ceiling in the back of the kitchen, really I guess it’s the dining room, has a the ceiling structure, then dry wall which is painted, then a drop down to a square panel ceiling, then another further drop down to another square panel ceiling, which has had a knockdown applied to it. All in all, they’ve lowered the ceiling I would say about 8 inches after adding all these layers. I’m really just making my house bigger.
As I’m sure you find on many or all houses people have their own way of doing things. The previous owners of this place loved to do things on their own, but they had no idea what they were doing. From what I can see they were just trying to make this small house feel smaller. They were quite successful at this, I’m doing my best to reverse it.
Living room looking into the Kitchen.
Some amazing artwork, make an offer, you know you want it.
Kitchen, all of this is going, besides the wood floors. This will be the best part of the house, which is very exciting.
The exposed drop ceilings, what a waste of headroom.
Anyways, this is just the beginning, it’s becoming more daunting as the days past, good thing the place isn’t very big.