Procrastinet

"Towards a 2BR" Part I: I Can Not Stop Destroying Our House

filed under: Demolishments and Renewvations

I haven't finished documenting the Basement Chronicles, even though the basement itself has been basically finished for over six months. I'm planning to take nice pictures for the "after" part of the before and after, but now that will have to wait as I've declared open war upon another part of the house: our bedroom. So we've relocated our sleeping quarters (and all our stuff) downstairs and junked up the basement with it.

Our apartment has one narrow, long bedroom, which until now we've been sharing with Max - he has the side to the left of the door, we have the side to the right. We decorated only haphazardly, and Max's side especially has kind of a warehousey feel - his crib and changing table are there, along with everything else we own but don't really know what to do with. Spare chairs, piles of linens, a stray lamp or two.

For about two years now I've been cavalierly proclaiming that I was going to convert the room into two bedrooms so Max can have his own. Since this will require re-plumbing of the baseboard heaters, summer is the time to do it because the heaters will be empty of scalding hot water when I cut them open. I'm between shows now, so it was suddenly time to put up or shut up.

I realized that if I thought too hard about the scope of the project I'd never get off my duff. So yesterday without giving myself time to think about it I packed up our bedroom and moved everything downstairs. After about half an hour it occurred to me what I was doing, and I started to feel a bit like a man possessed. "What am I doing?" I'd shout to Lisa as I tromped past with armloads of dresser drawers. "Why do I keep DOING THIS?"

By about 2pm the bedroom was empty:

(click on pictures for full size)

(More after the jump...)

It turns out that when a household has four cats in it, behind and under each piece of furniture lurks a marauding army of dust bunnies. Here is the armada I collected from what would, at a glance, have seemed like a passably clean room:

For a sense of scale, the black and white patch in the lower right quadrant is a toy mouse. The uberbunny was at least nine inches tall by a foot and a half in diameter. When I turned around, there was a smaller bunny actually climbing the wall behind me, trying to get up to head level to launch itself at my throat. Tricky devils.

With the room empty it was time for demolition: the closet, currently on the far side of our half of the room, will instead be part of the center dividing wall - so the old closet had to be taken apart.

Note to anyone who is too impatient to let their malfunctioning cordless screwdriver go through its longer-than-usual recharging cycle and therefor decides to dismantle a 5' x 11' x 3' metal stud structure with a hand screwdriver: don't.

So now I get to re-enter the wonderful world of dumpster rental, to pitch out the remants of the old closet, and then make with the plumbing and the rewiring and the light fixtures and the wall and the closet and the drywalling and the painting... Oy vey.

And unlike the basement, this time I'm in a hurry, as we're sleeping on the couch for the duration.

Posted by rjt at June 27, 2005 11:18 AM