Our adult children recognize our project capabilities, and Jon and Katherine had two they hoped we’d be able and willing to tackle during our stay. No problem! The first involved removing a broken playroom window and closing the hole it left in the wall. The boys accidentally broke the window when the handle on the door to the outside smashed into it. Originally, this window opened directly to the outside, because the playroom had been an outside patio. Before Jon and Katherine bought the house, the patio was enclosed as part of a flip. Anyway, the window no longer served any purpose, so they wanted it removed and the hole closed.

We removed the broken window and parts of the door trim and affected baseboard, installed wall studs, insulated the wall, installed new gyp board, taped and floated, slap-brushed the new wall finish, reinstalled the baseboard and trim, caulked the joints, and painted everything. The thresholds for the room’s three doors had never been properly caulked during the flip, so I took care of that too.

For the second project, they wanted us to give them a head start on remodeling the laundry room, so it could include a butler’s pantry. The interior and exterioir of the existing laundry room looked like this.

Part of the problem with the laundry room configuration was that the inward swinging door made the laundry room small and tight. They wanted it replaced with a pocket door, and that of course meant the shelved cabinet had to be removed. Demolition continues to be my favorite task, so I attacked with vigor, after we protected the floor and rest of the house from demolition dust.

Pulling out the shelved cabinet and removing the gyp walls and studs were easy. Even taking up the floor tile beneath the shelved cabinet wasn’t bad, once I found the technique. I was able to save all but one, just in case they wanted to reuse them.

Jon helped by removing most of the shelved cabinet framing still attached to the ceiling, and I took over from there. While pulling the rest of the framing and gyp down was also easy, there was no way to prevent the loose attic insulation and years of accumulated rodent feces from raining down on me. I was beside myself with anger and swore both loudly and freely to anyone who’d listen.

Next, we tackled the pocket door. We installed a new double 2″ X 6″ beam, which spanned the full width of the opening to adequatley support the pocket door and framing. Once in place, the beam was dead level; however, the floor wasn’t. Therefore, we attached the new the door frame to the beam such that the pocket door defaulted to “open” unless purposely latched closed. We certainly didn’t want it constantly sliding closed if they needed to move in and out of the room frequently.

The floor track for the pocket door needed to be ramset to the concrete slab (my second most favorite task after demo). We capitalized on the situation to let Katherine have her construction moment and teach Logan about the ramset process. One of my favorite things about Katherine is her giggle. Listen closely and you’ll hear it four times during the video. Too funny!

With the door installed, we screwed the gyp board onto the ceiling and walls. Then MFI did her masterful taping and floating, and I sanded after each application (my least favorite task).

Before leaving town, we only had time for two more tasks: texturing the ceiling and walls and painting. We applied a traditional orange peel on the ceiling and slap brush on all the new wall sections.

We were hoping to be able to tile the small patch of floor in the laundry room; however, Jon and Katherine didn’t like the match we found (we couldn’t blame them). Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time before leaving town to remove the rest of the tile and install whatever new tile they had yet selected.

We disliked leaving the project unfinished, and our departure left them with having to finish the project. The remaining scope included: new floor tiles, new base cabinets, new countertop, new wall cabinets/shelves, caulking, and fresh paint. We know Jon has already removed the old tile floor and made some repairs on the water lines. We will update this blog with pictures of how it eventually turned out.