Let's get ready to.... rubble!

To save you from boredom and to cut back on the hundreds of pictures we took during the destruction phase I’ve selected a bunch to give you an idea how much we demolished. I tried to take pictures from the same angles to make it easier to tell what you’re looking at. Unfortunately unless you know the house as well as we do a lot of pictures of each room look similar. Let’s just say that a VERY high percentage of the inside and outside was gone by the time we were done swinging sledge hammers and kicking through drywall (my favorite part!). This took place last summer with some days reaching over 100 degrees! It was a dirty job but someone had to do it...

Here is the living room facing the front door.

Here is the front wall of the house in the living room. We discovered that none of the walls had any real insulation. The cost to heat this house in the winter must have been tremendous!

Demolition of the kitchen and bathroom area took a while. Here is the kitchen with the cabinets and drywall gone. In the wall we found boxes of razor blades that must have been left there from the original construction.

This is the little closet next to the kitchen where the furnace, hot water heater and other components were located.

We broke through the back wall of that closet, opening up the downstairs so that the other side of the house is now accessible through the kitchen. Previously there was no way to get from the kitchen to the bathroom or the bedrooms without walking through the living room.

With the closet walls down we were able to break through the shared wall between the kitchen and the bathroom.

And remove it completely!

Here’s Kevin’s dad with our trusty construction supervisor, Carson! All the kitchen and bathroom pipes were removed leaving nothing but the very heavy cast iron bathtub. It eventually made its way outside and sold on Craig’s List along with some of the appliances from the kitchen.

We also removed the wall separating the two bedrooms downstairs. This is a picture looking at the area that will become the master bedroom.

Turn around and now you’re looking at what will become our master bathroom (formerly the second bedroom and located in the back of the house).

This is one of the closets in the bedrooms. Altogether there were four of these, two in each room. They took up a lot of space so we tore them out.

All the interior walls were then removed downstairs leaving us one big open space. This allowed us redesign the downstairs floor plan the way we wanted.

Let’s move on to the upstairs! Here’s that funky shelving and the area between the two bedrooms upstairs.

Everything upstairs was gutted down to the studs as well. Here is the back of the blue bedroom.

Here’s the front of the blue bedroom.

The half bath upstairs used to be here. We took down the walls in order to turn it into a full bath and make it larger.

The front of the red bedroom.

Here’s the back of the red bedroom. We removed a section of the wall so we could toss all the drywall and trash right into the trailer and haul it off to the dump.

That’s our interior demolition in a nutshell. Keep in mind while this was going on we were also replacing the outside walls of the house due to termite damage, badly installed windows, and 50 years of soil movement around the foundation. Stay tuned!