Master Bedroom Renovation Challenge: [Stage 1] Wall Demolition

master bedroom before renovation
Catch up on the renovation progress! 
 

Last week we left off with the plans for our master bedroom and walk-in closet. This past weekend we moved our mattress from the “spare oom” to a front bedroom, and Karl and his Dad got to work on part one of the demo: knocking a new doorway between our two back bedrooms.

We had already discovered that the wall had been replaced with drywall from the previous owner and a supporting beam ran the length above the wall studs, making it non-load bearing (unless we were planning on taking out the entire wall – then that’d be a different story). However, as Karl began knocking a few test holes into the wall Friday night, he found something neither of us have seen before…

…plywood. Plywood was behind the drywall.

Say whah?

Digging a bit deeper on Saturday we found haphazardly placed wood fillers/spacers toward the baseboards. It seems the past owner had used these and the plywood to make the wall flush when he took out the original plaster and lath is our best guess.

Karl’s Dad ripping up the carpet

 

odd spacers

 

Behind the plywood was insulation. The menfolk took out the insulation and we found we had drywall on the opposite wall as well.

 

The original hand-hewn studs were still there. We only had to take out one, and we’d like to find a way to repurpose it as it is such a cool piece.

If you were able to follow along on Instagram this past weekend, here’s the boys sporting a pose with their work on the doorway:


If you remember from last week’s post, we’re striving to get the master bedroom move-in-ready 4-6 weeks from now. The next stage of this room will involve taking out the existing closet, finding a 30″ door for the new closet opening, and installing a threshold in the new doorway.

We’ll be taking the trim from the existing closet and re-using it for around the new doorway on both sides, and we may be using a door that seems to have been original to the house that we found in our garage. The door will need a lot of refinishing work and we need to take a closer look to see if there’s any wood rot, but it would be cool if we could use it.

This room will hopefully keep shaping up at a steady pace! We’ll be likely tackling the closet trim this week. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see my mood board for the design of this room as well!


Shared On: thatdiyparty

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