Good Bye Wall

There is a wall in the dark, dank, brown paneled garage between where the car goes and the laundry/mud room. I'm guessing this wall wasn't part of the original plan as it is blocking off the only window that would allow daylight into the whole garage, and who would wanna do that?! The laundry/mud room also has the only door that goes to the back/side yard. The laundry/mud room used to have the same dark, dank, brown paneling as the garage plus some big dark, dank cabinets that were way to tall for me to reach. I removed the paneling and the cabinets in that room a month or so ago revealing white bead board underneath. Although there are many imperfections in the walls and ceiling - removing that paneling and cabinet in the laundry/mud room has made it much brighter and, I'm not scared to go in there to do my laundry anymore. 


I started removing the paneling on the garage side of the wall that divides the two rooms and found there was ship-lap board, painted white, underneath the dark, dank, brown paneling! yay! This gave me hope that if I could remove all the paneling in the garage, I may have the beginnings of another room I wasn't scared to go into - but I still needed to get natural light into the garage - so the wall that divided the garage from the laundry/mud room had to go away. 

the wall between

The dark, dank brown paneling was easy enough to remove. It pretty much just rips right off, once you find a starting point. The ship-lap, however was not that easy. I'm sure it was the original material used when they put together this little 1945 house because the nails were super strong and the boards were tongue and groove, which made it hard to start. I really wanted to save as many of the boards as possible. One board edge was stamped with a mill stamp from Oregon. I wish I could've save it but as soon as I started to pry it loose, the board split.The bead board on the laundry/mud room side was a lot easier to remove. I was able to save a few panels of it, I will keep it to patch up some of the "imperfections" mentioned earlier. 

starting to see the light

I removed what I could until I had to get the ladder out. It became apparent after almost knocking myself out while trying to pull one of those nails made of super metal out, that I wasn't going to be able to do the rest on my own. I learned pretty quickly how important having your feet firmly planted on the ground was for leverage. Good thing I have friends with height. I called in the aide of the Linman's! Eric is 6'2" (or more.. seems like more to my 5'2" frame), and Maria, well, she's vertically challenged, like me, but is very powerful when she needs to be. Eric was able to bust out almost all of the upper wall in a about half an hour. (It took me three days to do the lower part...) There were some boards that continued on past the door that we were going to have to cut with a Sawsall - so those were left behind for another day. Maria and I figured we could handle that part ourselves, and I was pretty excited about the idea of using a power tool. A couple of days later, after a wonderful brunch at Autenica, Maria and I rented a Sawsall at Park Rose Hardware. I could wonder around that store for hours. I have no idea what most of the stuff in there does - but it's kind of fascinating. The guy at the rental desk fitted us with the proper equipment, and said that he didn't see many ladies renting Sawsall's. He kept trying to sell me the additional insurance - I don't think he had much confidence in us... After a stop in the clothes isle looking for real denim jeans (which we didn't find in ladies sizes - bummer), we headed back to finish the task at hand.

Maria demonstrates how effective the sawsall is at cutting twine. (not really!)

Maria and I pondered why they named it "sawsall", and posed for a few "oh no you dint' it'" pictures for Eric's benefit. 

I wonder if the sawsall will go through electrical wires?! (not really!)

It was a little scary using, what I consider to be a big power tool, but we did it! After I got the hang of it, we were able to cut the remaining wall boards, and then cut up some boards to fit in between the studs to serve as shelves.

done! for today anyway.

It took us about three hours (some of that time was spent laughing hysterically as we came to conclusions  of how hard we had made the measuring and inserting of the boards in between the studs - that's another story) but we had totally reached the objective of bringing light into the dark, dank, brown paneled garage! When I returned the sawsall to Park Rose Hardware, the guy seemed shocked, but delighted that we had managed to return with all of our fingers, and more importantly, the sawsall was still in operating order (I only dropped it once!).

Thanks for helping me bring in the light, Linmans!