There’s no better remedy for a case of the Monday blues than swinging a sledgehammer. It must have been an especially slow Monday, because we tackled demolition in four different spots around the house yesterday.
Demo Day 2007 began with demo project #1: removing the chair rail in the dining room that we’re converting into a third bedroom. Chair rail molding looks odd in a bedroom, so it had to go. I was at work for this part, but when I arrived home the chair rail was already stripped away—Sherry handled it easily with a hammer, a crowbar, and some solid determination. Goodbye, chair rail.
Underneath we discovered gross yellow paint and early ’70s wallpaper. Even worse than what we had seen when we moved in, but at least it’s out of sight now and ready for fresh walls.
When I got home, it was time for demo project #2, which Sherry had already started earlier in the day: breaking up the decorative slate medallion in the middle of the backyard. This is part of our plan to expand the lawn and create more usable green space.
The actual breaking was easier than we expected. Sherry and I took turns swinging the 20-pound sledgehammer while humming Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” and within minutes the medallion was reduced to pieces. The real work was removing the sand base beneath the slate. It took much more time and effort to dig out that layer, but in the end a larger, grassy backyard is worth the effort.
Next up was demo project #3: moving the garden arch to make more room for grass. Again, demolition wasn’t the hard part. We dug around the stakes and worked the arch loose with some strategic shimming and muscle. Relocating it to the back of the property took a little more effort than anticipated, and because it started getting dark we only made a tentative attempt to stake it into its new position before calling a dinner break.
After some Taco Bell and a run to Lowe’s for topsoil, I thought the demolition frenzy was over. Then I spotted Sherry holding a hammer again. That’s when demo project #4 began: opening up our laundry area. It was about 10:30 p.m., but the momentum kept going.
There aren’t many good “before” photos because the space looked unremarkable—just cheap painted bi-fold doors hiding a cramped closet with a washer, dryer, and two cluttered shelves. The enclosure did a great job of concealing our mess, but it also made the hallway between the sunroom and the den feel tight and squeezed.
We started by removing the bi-fold doors, and before long we were taking down the wall above the opening as well. A crowbar and some brute force did the trick. The laundry nook, the hallway, and even some of our clothes ended up dusted in drywall particles, but the space immediately felt much more open.
Our plan now is to widen the doorway by about 10–12 inches to further open the hallway. We’ll add cabinet doors to the upper shelf to hide clutter, and eventually replace the existing washer and dryer with front-loading models to create a cleaner, brighter laundry nook. For now, we’re enjoying the open feel—demo work is a strange sort of therapy, and for us it’s definitely more fun than the rebuilding phase.