Home Improvement

That's right: I am doing a blog entry not sports related (don't get used to it)

For the last month or so, with the help of my parents, I have turned into a Home Depot weekend warrior. I have had a lot of projects in mind that I would like to do to this house of mine, finally decided that project one would be to update the basement. I will try to do updates on this in segments as they come.

Step one was dis-mantling what was already there. The ceiling was an outdated drop tile ceiling with borders that looked like 70's wood paneling. The Tiles themselves were actually in decent enough shape, but it looked pretty terrible so it had to go. Getting the tiles themselves off wasn't too difficult, although it was messy and became covered in dust. The difficult part was removing the framing as every piece was attached to the ceiling with wire. It was a pain in the butt, but relatively easy compared to the work that the walls required.

The walls had two components on them: The top section was drywall that had wallpaper stuck right to it, and the bottom was a cheap wood panelling. The panelling was relatively easy to remove. The hard part was the dry wall. First we had to remove the old wallpaper which, as I said earlier had been stuck to the drywall with seemingly no primer so it was difficult to remove. Once the wallpaper was removed we were able to access the nails to remove the dry wall pieces themselves. Once we had all the pieces removed we had a picture of what was behind.

Now, neither myself nor my father are licensed carpenters, but I believe the people who built the house had no idea what they were doing. Many times when examining the structure we find ourselves saying "Why the heck would they do that?"

As mentioned, the top half was sheet rock, so behind that was just the studs and insulation. Since the bottom layer of panel was thinner, they had to put a layer of shims all around the room so that the two levels would sit plush. So I had to go around with a hammer and pull out every single shim, probably about 50 total. And then go back and find the residual nails. Some of the Styrofoam insulation was damaged, but nothing terrible. Our other major discovery was a third window that had just been covered. At first when we saw it we figured the window was gone, but had just left the frame. Upon further inspection, we discovered that the pane itself was still in there.

Kind of a random ranting about what we've done. Next step we are working on is the expand the duct work before the ceiling goes up. As of right now, there are only two grates and they are both on the primary duct, so we are going to extend out in both directions to get better circulation in the room.

All I can say is it is a good thing my dad is good at this stuff, because otherwise if it were just me, it would end up looking like it was before we took it down. More to follow as it develops.