Well, I am finally on summer break from school. Which means two things. One – I can update here more and two – we are renovating our bedroom. It will be a fairly similar process to when we renovated our spare room, which you can look back on in my entry Spare Room, only this time we are adding French doors to the outdoor wall with the idea that we will eventually put a deck in the backyard.
About two Sundays ago, Matt and I moved our bedroom to the spare room. That took a few hours and as a result our house looks as if we just moved in all over again. Which, if you know me, gives me anxiety like no business. But I digress.
Monday evening we began demo in our bedroom. We lasted about an hour and a half before calling it and the next day I finished up the rest. That Wednesday, I set quite the ambitious schedule for myself with the intention of borrowing my dad’s truck and cleaning up all of the drywall, removing all the insulation and taking it all to the dump. And when I mean I set the schedule up for myself, I mean – by myself.
I started out the day by heading to the gym, because, you know, bagging up and hauling dry wall was not going to be exercise enough for me apparently. By 9:40 I was in full blown clean up mode, gathering up the pieces of drywall we had taken down with a hammer and crowbar and shoving them into heavy duty garbage bags. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fill them up too much. Drywall is pretty heavy and I still needed to get the bags from our bedroom, out the door and into my dad’s pickup – alone. I wanted to avoid dragging the bags across our hardwood floor, so it was everything I could do to pick them up and hold them out at arms length, while trying to avoid rubbing the bags against me for fear of being stuck by a nail.
9:55 am – regretting my arm workout
As I continued, I decided to skip putting the larger pieces of drywall into the bags and to just toss them in the back of the truck as I went. I created piles of the bigger pieces and took as much as I could at one time.
10:15 am – regretting my leg workout
By about 10:30 I had filled the truck to capacity and headed to the dump where I had to lift the bags out of the truck and swing them over the short wall they have.
10:45 am – regretting my workout altogether
The dump didn’t take long and I was back at it within a half hour. I packed up the remaining drywall and then decided it was time to take down and pack up the old insulation. As you can see from the photo, it hadn’t been replaced for decades. It is probably the same insulation that was put in when the house was originally built in 1947.
Taking out insulation can be a very nasty job. Since this insulation is so old, it seems to tear as soon you touch it. Inside is a bunch of disgusting fiberglass just waiting to mess you up.
Because taking insulation out is so messy I had to be prepared to protect my arms from the tiny fiberglass, my nose and mouth from inhaling it and my eyes. As a result, I gathered an old sweatshirt, my Biology goggles and a 3m respirator mask which I had also used while tearing down the drywall.
It was quite the getup and extremely hot. Seattle is going through a bit of a heat wave right now and being bundled up like this was torture. As a result, I tried to move as quickly and efficiently as possible. I don’t think it took me much longer than a half hour to get everything done, but it seemed like longer. I was drenched in sweat by the time I was done.
11:45 am – WHY DID I GO TO THE GYM?
After a much needed lunch break and quick visit from my mom, I was back at it and had the second dump run done by about 2:30. I still had vacuuming, mopping and some general touch ups to do before we could move on to the next phase, but it took me less than 15 minutes into the final clean up to realize I was done. So I packed it in and finally took a shower at 3:00 and it was GLORIOUS.
Moral of the story – packing and hauling drywall IS a good workout.
Since then, the bedroom has been cleaned up and we are preparing for the next phase – rewiring the room. That will rely heavily on Matt in the beginning as he’s an amateur electrician and then we can continue on.
Stay tuned for the next phase of our bedroom renovation!
Stay cool, Seattle!
Rain City Life 