Post 27: Half Bath Demolition

Thanks for stopping by!  Last time, we talked about re-doing our dining room table.  Today, we are showing you a room in our house that is desperate for a face lift -- our half bath.  

Our half bath was one of those areas where we knew we needed a change, but we weren't quite sure what it was.  The room was a little dark and dated, so we decided the best direction to go was bright and new!

To pick apart the room a little bit, here is our list of things we weren't crazy about:

• Dark wallpaper
• No mirror over the sink
• Dim lighting focused on one side of the room
• Furdown over the sink
• Lack of storage

Way back when we were working on our dining room and removing wallpaper like we were wallpaper ninjas, we thought we could just mosey on over to the half bath and peel off that paper in nothing flat.

WRONG.

The wallpaper in the bathroom came off in strips about an inch wide and not much longer.  That was when we could even peel it away from the wall at all.  Yikes!  (The pictures below are after working for several HOURS!!)

We needed a plan B.

I really like the way farmhouse bathrooms look with white shiplap or paneling covering the walls, so I thought that would be a great solution to cover up our stubborn wallpaper. 

Before we started putting up paneling, we needed to remove our furdown and adjust our can lights on the ceiling to brighten more of the room.  This was our first real "demolition" experience in our house, so we put it off for a while... for over a year!  But one day, Alan got really brave and decided that worst-case scenario, we could call in a professional to fix any damage we did, so we got to work.

Like our dining room, this was a long project, so I broke it out into phases.

Phase 1: Demolition -- Removing the Furdown

Before I explain phase one, let me answer the question, "What is a furdown?"  I googled the definition with very little luck, so here's the Sulak definition.

Furdown: noun /fər-doun/: a section of the ceiling that is dropped lower than the rest of the ceiling, typically to house duct work or fill the gap between the ceiling and cabinetry; similar to soffit.

Our furdown held two canned lights and an air vent, so all three of these things would have to be moved into the wall/ceiling after the furdown was removed.  We weren't sure how all of these were mounted, so we had to figure it out as we went.

We started by removing the vent cover and canned light covers so that we could unhook the cans from the ceiling.

Next, we removed the drywall from the frame of the furdown.  

Once we did this, we could see that the air vent was nailed to the framework of the furdown and the can lights were screwed in and hung by metal bars on the frame.

Alan disconnected these from the frame and took the lights out completely so that he could remove the wooden frame more easily.  

This is when we thought a sawzall/reciprocating saw would come in handy, but we didn't want to spend the money and the project wasn't huge, so we used a hammer and a crowbar to pull down the wooden frame of the furdown.  (A few times, we used a jigsaw to divide the boards and remove smaller pieces at a time.  A sawzall is pretty much made for this, so we may invest in one if we take out more furdowns in the future.)

Once the furdown was out, we realized that there were some wires that would need to be re-routed before we put the drywall up.  (Basically, there were wires that were hidden in the furdown, but since that is no longer there, they didn't have a place to hide.)  

We weren't sure if we could make holes in the studs without compromising the structural integrity of the room (or starting a fire), so we called an electrician to make sure we were doing the job right.  He was a ton of help and we learned a lot for future projects. 

Drop by later to see what we found out and see how we start to put the room back together.