Tearing the Living Room Down

I think it might be easiest to track the project if I go through the house room by room, and the living room had top priority on our list of things to tackle.  The living room had full height very dark paneling on the wall, a heavy popcorn texture (which was coming down in spots), water damage on the ceiling from the old skylights (the skylights Dustin had replaced and sealed, so they did not leak, however the stains were never covered), dark brown carpet, and a very dated ceiling fan.

 

 Taken when Dustin first moved into the house

 (looking into the kitchen/dinning room)

 

 Looking towards the fireplace - you can see the water damage 

around the skylights here     

The first thing we did was remove all the popcorn texture on the ceiling (we actually did this to ALL the rooms because nearly every room had a spot that was flaking off).  Before we began this process we taped plastic all over the floors and over all the walls in every room - to keep the mess contained.  Using a 2 gallon spray pump we sprayed water over the ceiling and let it soak in for a few minutes and then sprayed over it again.   Then with a mud knife we scrapped the popcorn down.  This really was fun in my opinion because it was easy to see the progress; with each scrape another 6" wide length of popcorn texture plopped down to the ground relieving the Sheetrock underneath.  (Unfortunately we didn't get any photos of this process - as I was not thinking about blogging about it at the time).  This does create a large mess and a smell, so I would STRONGLY recommend fully covering yourself (long sleeve shirt, pants, shoes, and a bandanna to cover your head) and wearing a mask to avoid breathing any of it into your lungs.  

When we scrapped down the popcorn texture it revealed all these fun problems 

that we had to address

Next we removed the paneling from the wall - this too was fun as it was quick and made the room seem brighter already.  However we discovered a few things in doing this.  One was that the paneling was placed over the unfinished Sheetrock - it was glued and nailed up, so when we pulled the panels down it left nail holes, ripped off the top layer of paper on the Sheet rock, and left glue behind.  (In other-words, it left a HUGE mess).  As in any home improvement project we also ran into some surprises when we pulled down the paneling.  For one reason or another the paneling was put up behind the brick fire place, and since there was no way to move the brick fireplace we had to use a special osculating saw to cut the paneling, baseboard, and trim along the fireplace.  

 This shows the progress of the popcorn scrapped down, and the glue the

paneling left behind

 Assessing what to do next in our alien attire - Thanks dad for all your help!

Some other little challenges pulling down the paneling revealed consisted of: 

• A hole in the wall between an outlet and where a cable box should have been (you can kind of see this in the above photo on the wall behind my dad.
• A large crack - probably caused from settling above the door frame (you can see this on the far side of the door frame I am standing by).
• We discovered that the studs were put 24" on center and the Sheetrock was ran horizontally - thus there was some flexing between the sheets at the seams so if we just filled in the seams with mud it would probably crack if anything leaned against the wall.

So all that wraps up the demolition phase of the living room - next in the process: put everything back together.