Surprise Surprise

So I mentioned before that we are planning on blowing insulation into the walls of the living room. The reason we are doing this is because the first day we were allowed in the house Nate said "let's poke a hole in the wall to see what's behind it". So we got out a hammer and put a hole in the wall and guess what we saw... that's right.... nothing. There was not even a little bit of insulation in the house which I have now learned is common in houses this old. Therefore we decided to tear down the exterior wallboard on this side of the house and put up nice warm insulation. This is what the majority of the renovation in the office and bedroom consisted of so I'm going to give you a step by step guide on how to make your house warmer the hard way.

Step 1: Tear down all old wall board/whatever they created the walls with. For us this was a combo drywall plaster mess. While it isn't as by as plaster and lathe it's still gross. Tearing down the wall board was my job and I quickly realized my days as a thrower had been over for a little too long. At one point I couldn't pull off a piece and Nate walked in and with one hand ripped it off the studs...oh well. Another thing I realized with this job was that I'm a lot shorter in real life than in my head. Since me ripping the wall board off the studs resulted in me flying backwards I couldn't use a ladder and so I had to come to grips with the fact I couldn't get the top of the wall board off. Thankfully my dad visited and went to town and it was gone! Yeah for tall people!

Step 2: Clean up. So we took four walls down and created what seemed like 20 barrels of trash and more dust than you can imagine. Things we have learned for this: If you are going to make a mess get a great shop vac... it will save your life.

Step 3: Rough inspection. So when you open up walls this opens up the opportunity for people to poke their nose in your business. Therefore before you put up insulation you need to get your rough walls signed off on. Not a big deal but kinda annoying. I'm going to also include in this step the electrical. This is Nate's business so all I know is that there are a lot of wires and boxes and things I don't understand but that also needs a rough inspection before anything else goes up.

This is what it looks like once you've got the walls down

Left is the bedroom and right is my office. 

Step 4: Put insulation up. So for this we used the warmest insulation which is indicated by the R value. In our case we used R-15. All you have to do is buy the right size, put it in between the studs and staple it up! The only tricky parts are electrical boxes and around windows. Luckily when we had the rough inspection our inspector was nice enough to inspect our insulation so he didn't have to come back before we put up the drywall.

 

 Step 5: Put drywall up. OK so this is where it gets a little tricky. Big areas are easy to do because you can just screw it in. However, you have windows and outlets and all these other things that you can't cover up. So you measure and cut the drywall so that it fits around everything. Sound easy? Well that old adage of measure twice cut once just did not seem to work for me! I would measure the outlet boxes more that twice and not once did the hole end up in the correct spot. So after a lot of cutting recutting holding and putting in more screws than you could  imagine the walls were back up. Once again we had to get an inspection.

Bedroom and Office 

Step 6: Tape joints and plaster: This is so the seams between drywall don't show. Nate's dad came down and taught us the art of doing this so you can't see the seams. It takes about three layers so the tape doesn't show and corners take even more but it makes everything look awesome!

 

 

Step 7: Prime and Paint! So when you have new drywall primer is super important because the new drywall absorbs a ton. Once the primer is up we get to put up paint and that's where it gets fun! We chose a greyish blue for the bedroom and peach for the office with an orange accent wall.

 

   

Step 8: Trim. So this is the last finishing touch. We are putting crown molding up in both rooms. We aren't finished painting them yet but it'll give you an idea of what it will look like. Courtney and I learned that hammering at the ceiling, once again when you're on the shorter side, is very difficult.

 

The last little treat is in the office. The wall that is shares with the bathroom is extra thick because of the stack pipe and so we decided to put in some built in book selves!

 

Adam and Nate worked so hard to make the bookshelves exactly how I wanted them and then some plumbing in the bathroom completely messed up the symmetry... oh well I still think they look great!