March 8, 2015

We had another cool, rainy day yesterday but at least we haven't gotten any more snow.  Deb continued working on her kitchen cabinets today.  She finished sanding the doors and drawer fronts and got started pulling up the contact paper in preparation of refinishing the cabinet interiors.

 

 

While Deb was working on the cabinets, I started taking down the pine paneling from the walls which will be the new master closet.  The paneling will get reused in the sewing room which is the other part of the room that is being split to create the master closet.

 

Here is the room we are converting to two rooms.  We are going to replace the window with one half the size and wall up the opening on the left side.  The closet will be 6 feet deep and 11 1/2 feet wide.  That will leave Deb's sewing room at roughly 7' x 11 1/2'.

 

In order to remove the paneling and window I first had to remove all the trim from the window and the walls that had to have the paneling removed.  This was a rather tedious process because we intend to reuse as much of the original wood as can be salvaged.  I used a cypress wedge to pry against to keep from damaging the paneling during trim removal.

 

 

This was my starting point for paneling removal.  I knew I was going to have to destroy one board to get it started.  Just so happened there was one over the window that already had a nice crack running the length of it.

 

 

It took me a pretty long while to get to this point.  I was being entirely too careful. I realized no matter what I did, some of the nails were going to pull through the paneling when I pried on them.  I will just do the fire blocks on the new partition wall a little different so I can nail through the boards in a different spot.

 

 

The rest of the wall came off considerably faster.  Maybe because I decided to stop trying to pull all the nails out of each panel as soon as I got it off the wall.

 

 

As you can see, I have plenty to do after work this week.  All those boards have nails in them still.

 

 

We intended to take the paneling off the wall on the left side of the room as well, but then I ran into this.

 

 

It's kind of hard to tell what is going on here from the picture.  The boards in the top of the picture are on the ceiling and the board on the bottom left of the picture is the last wall board.  The last two boards on the long wall as well as the wall to the left were tucked behind the ceiling boards.  We had intended on sheet rocking the entire closet, but decided not to take the chance of destroying any more paneling and leave the wall on the left in tact.  We'll do shelves or something of that nature to highlight that wall.