Below is what the room looked like before I started. The carpet was badly stained and smelled terrible. The fake wood panelling looked like crap, and the ceiling was worse.I ripped out the false ceiling, loft, fake wood paneling, closet, and carpet. As you can see, the plaster behind the panelling was in pretty bad shape, too. The plaster was old enough that it was made with animal hair as a binder, which made it smell pretty bad when wet, which it often was, from roof and air conditioner leaks.Ripping down the plaster was fun and quick. Getting rid of it was not. I made a plywood chute going out the window to help get the debris out of the room quickly. Of course, then I had a huge pile of debris on the ground outside. But a bunch of my brothers pitched in to help, and it only took a couple days to get it all into a dumpster.A lot had to be done at this stage. The existing electrical was mostly old tube-and-knob wiring. There were only two outlets in the whole room, and one of them was just an outlet box screwed onto the windowsill, with wire running to it through a groove cut into the plaster wall. So I replaced all of the wiring and installed six new outlets. I also moved the previously surface-mounted voice and data cables into the wall.
There was a 4" cast-iron sewer-vent pipe in one wall that was completely rusted through, venting sewer gas into the room, which I replaced with new PVC pipe.
I removed all of the ceiling joists except for two in the middle, which I kept temporarily to make it easier to reach the ceiling for putting up insulation. To support a vertical post holding up the roof peak, I used one of the old joists to make a new collar tie.
Removing the old ceiling required that I extend the south wall vertically to meet that part of the new ceiling. To do this, I had to cut off the ends of many beams and joists that had extended above the old ceiling area. I also removed the slate tile that was on the old roof - my room was part of an extension of the building.
There were also some serious gaps and holes in the exterior wall, where cold air, weather, and small rodents were getting inside. Most of the gaps were thin enough that I was able to seal them with expanding foam. One very large hole required new wood on the outside and foam on the inside. |
