Bye Bye Closet!

We started and finished our first demolition project a few weeks ago!  With the holidays approaching, we knew we needed to finally knock this one out. Our house was converted into apartments back in the 1940's, as were many in the neighborhood.  Many homeowners did this when family members were overseas during WWII as an extra source of income.  What is now our living room was previously used as a bedroom for the downstairs unit and what good is a bedroom without a closet?  It's amazing just how much room it took up in that space.  We made the best of it initially by making it a TV nook before we finished the TV room/den.  After that and buying new living room furniture, it just stuck out like a sore thumb!

Dressing it up was pretty much a lost cause.  It completely made arranging furniture impossible and we were forced to have the couch almost on top of the arm chairs due to how much room that thing took up.  It had to go!

With a little help from a friend who knows what he's doing when it comes to things like this, we prepped the room for the closet's demise.

The morning of...it had no idea what was coming

 

We just knew it was going to be a few sheets of drywall and a few 2x4's, but man little did we know that this thing must have served as some kind of safe room back in the day.  It was built above and beyond any building code that exists today!

 

 



That big electrical cable in the top right was not cute!

Luckily it was a dead line that used to feed power to the kitchen appliances for the upstairs unit

After a few hours, it was gone, but a lot left to do!

We spent the rest of that afternoon and the next day patching and sanding, trying to bring the walls and ceiling as level as we could with the areas that were outside of the closet.  We had to sand the floor that was under the closet walls since the floors had been redone recently.  Luckily when the floors were refinished, they left the natural color and didn't stain them, so all we really needed to do was sand, clean, and apply polyurethane.

Within a couple of days, we had the ceiling and walls painted, the furniture back in the room, and new window treatments put up. 

What a difference!

There's room to spread out the furniture now!

It really shows the difference when you look at before and after pictures side by side...

 

Glad to have this little project out of the way!