Casa de Sangue: December 2015

Since moving in nearly 10 years ago, we have spent a lot of time trying to decide how to attach a garage to our house. We really miss being able to park inside and walk right into the house, without a thought to the weather outside, like we did at our last house. We drew plans for a garage addition to the existing house and also for an addition where we converted part of our existing house back into a garage (it's original state) and added on new space. Both looked great on paper, but had some major drawbacks (location of septic, location of trees, pitch of yard, COST, etc).

In the plan where we would convert part of the existing house back into a garage, we displaced an office and a storage room. The loss of storage wasn't too major, as we would have a similar amount of garage storage, after the conversion was complete. The loss of the office was much more drastic. We found ourselves drawing plans with a gigantic office and living room. Again these looked great on paper, but we weren't ready to bite off a project quite that big.

When we started thinking about how we currently use our house, the answer became clear. We have nearly an entire floor, "the first down" as we call it, that goes largely unused. Most of the space was tiled in a grey and brown tile, the walls were different colors and had several layers of half peeled wallpaper. Despite having a beautiful oakley stone fireplace, the room felt cold and dingy no matter what we did. We tried rugs and different furniture configurations to make the space feel warm and cozy, but it just never felt inviting. We ended up storing extra furniture in it most of the time, earning the space the name, "furniture graveyard".

We tabled all thoughts of additions, and decided to move forward on the garage conversion and "first down" remodel. For the remodel, we planned to create an office space, a bar with liquor and wine storage, and a den/library.

Once we decided, demolition began pretty quickly. We cleared everything out (which was no small chore!) and dug in...

Bam! Literally. In less than two hours, Aaron bashed out the tile with a hammer and scooped it up with a snow shovel.

Next, we needed to tear out a closet, some trim, and the existing mantle. We also wanted to add some electrical outlets, move a light switch, and get rid of the wiring for a light built into the old mantle.

We also wanted to the ability to add overhead light fixtures to the den portion of the room, at some later date, so we pulled the necessary wiring.

The office and den space are separated by a large overhead beam. I felt like the beam could be a focal point of the room, but there was a lot of work to be done before that would ever be the case. The beam was painted white and had quarter round trim attached to it wherever it butted up against drywall. Not too pretty. We removed the quarter round and hoped we would be able to come up with a good solution.

Once all the demolition and electrical work was completed, we hired a drywall contractor to come in to repair/replace all the missing drywall and then retexture the entire room and hallway. Here are some progress pictures after the second coat of mud. The first two coats of mud are used to "erase" the existing orange peel texture and bring the walls back to a blank canvas.

Den...