When I saw the sales brochure I felt the dining room looked very depressing.
In real life: it was depressing.
First round of demolition
We started with stripping the walls, as we did in the living room.
One of the more unexpected finds was the laminate on the walls (yes, you read that right; on the wall).
Yes, behind the first layers of wallpaper we found sheets of laminate with wood print. I guess in some point in time this was a quick upgrade? I wouldn’t know why you would want to do this otherwise?
But it was an easy part of the demolition because it peeled right of:
We also found more layers of wallpaper behind it which housed some nice treasures as well.
Felt good to get the wallpaper off.
We also ripped out all the sheets of wood and wallpaper covering the en suite door. The en suite was one of the best hidden features we’ve found.
Here you see it nailed to the wall, so it couldn’t move. They did damage the door slightly doing this, but we can fix that!
Also notice the dark brown paint on the ceiling…
When we got all the wallpaper off, you could already see the stucco being in poor condition. On the next picture the places where you see bare brick are parts that we barely touched. It just crumbled under our fingers.
For reference the other side of the room that you saw in the first picture.
Eventually we decided to take out the built in closet and the aweful bricks around the fireplace.
The second demolition round
We took a pretty long brake after the first round of demolition. There were so many other things to do and we were still hoping to save the ceiling.
But once we decided to take the ornate ceiling out, we ripped it out the same week.
You know the sight by now: straw and plaster everywhere:
This is just a part of the amount we cleaned up. Remember: this is just pieces of ceiling!
The ceiling has to be cleared of all the small nails that were used to keep up the straw. So it took an afternoon of getting all the nails out with a crowbar.
We also removed all the stucco from the walls that will not be insulated. So after demolition this is what’s left:
The en suite door and everything surrounding it is removed. The door is somewhere safe for the time being.
When you’re doing a big renovation like this, things keep moving from one place to the next and back again. So it’s not always easy to get the clean ‘after’ picture.
Where the fireplace was it now looks like this:
What’s next?
For now I’ll leave you here. The next update will be a bit more interesting hopefully. Insulation and stucco is up next!