This weekend was snowy and cold here in Minnesota, and mid-afternoon on Saturday the Hubs and I found ourselves in a quiet house with both kiddos napping and nothing to do. So we decided to give the Family Room a little hell.
If you remember here's where we left it:
We had decided that after nearly 2 years of living with it, the wood feature above the fireplace didn't work for how we lived, and we ripped it out. It felt liberating! Suddenly we weren't wasting all that time trying to figure out how to use what we had, but instead, we were on our way to making it what we wanted. Once we tore this proverbial band-aid off, everything seemed easier. We agreed that the shelf columns on either side of the fireplace just didn't work for us either. When you have that many shelves, the only thing you can do with them is fill them with nick-nacks, and we're not nick-nack people. Or dusting people for that matter. Hubs couldn't grab the sledge hammer fast enough.
We started by emptying off and removing all the shelves, and didn't get very far before little Bo woke up. But we know our strengths here at One Project at a Time, and the Hubs has got the demo thing down. So Bo and I positioned ourselves safely on the steps while Daddy went into Beast Demo Mode.
He made really quick work of the shelves actually, making sure to save as much of the wood as we could to re-purpose. (I already have some projects in mind for this stuff.) So with the wood piling up around us, next he used "Mister Smashy" as he affectionately calls it, to take the rock off the fireplace.
Once the rock was clear, he took out the ultimate in demo, the saws-all, and got to work on the plywood facade around the fireplace. There may or may not have been some manly grunting while using this saw.
It was crazy how much that opened things up. Next we took off the cupboards below the fireplace,
and then smashed all the tile off the hearth.
Surprise! Two layers of hearth tile- with this little brick pattern discovered underneath.
After he had smashed everything there was to smash, the Hubs went upstairs to hang with the boys while I got busy cleaning the space back up. I hauled all the wood out to the garage and sorted into trash and keep piles. I scooped up all the old rock and tile into a big drum garbage and dragged that outside, which was a serious bicep workout. And finally I swept and vacuumed up anything left. In my opinion, I got the far less fun part of the deal, but if you've read this blog before and know my husband's propensity to throw everything away, you know it was necessary that I be the one to do the sorting, or else everything would have been in the trash.
There's no turning back now...
I can barely remember when the room looked like this:
The next thing to go is this big old fireplace. We're leaving it in for now until we are 100% sure on what the new one will be.
So that's the status so far. We've both reluctantly agreed that this reno will go a lot slower than our previous ones now that there's an infant in the house, but we're chugging along nicely. What do you think? Would you have taken off the mantle piece? Would you have removed the shelves? I get that it's a personal decision, but I'm hoping once we all see the after we'll agree that cleaning house was the way to go! *Fingers crossed*
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