Fade To Pink, Part 1

So, sometime in October we took a look around and realized there wasn't nearly enough pink in the palace to make a little princess happy. We didn't have a place to put a little girl! The thing is, even though we technically have a four bedroom house, the little one upstairs was buried in craft stuff and sewing stuff and bins of boy's clothes and the one downstairs is our guest room. Okay, here's the options: 1) rearrange the guest room, move Kenrick downstairs, and make space for pink stuff in the boy's room, or 2) empty the craft room and strip it clean, rebuild with space for a crib and space for crafts and with walls painted to match the cutest little crib set you ever saw and put Paxton in a big boy bed next to his big brothers, dormitory style.

What option do you think we picked? Well, of course we did! You don't seriously expect Princess Pandemonium to share a room with stinky boys, do you?

So, here's Part One of the journey to a little pink room. First, a quick 'before' - after hauling countless bins and boxes down to the front porch and peeling the first layer of sheetrock off the walls.

Notice the worthless little 'closet' in the corner and the hundred-year-old wallpaper over lathe and plaster.



Also, notice the open window. The window is key, because how else do you get rid of 2500 pounds of lathe and plaster? You shovel it out the window, of course.



All that demolition makes for a tremendous mess, made worse by a layer of sporadically blown-in cellulose insulation in the attic (none in the walls). I was digging gunk out of my ears for three days afterwards.



Did I mention that, since we're making a mess anyway maybe we should tear out the upstairs hallway too? Well we did. More mess.

Finally it's time to start putting it all back together. Doug stopped by to help finish the framing and to help me stick the sheetrock to the ceiling so that I could blow in some new insulation.



Here it is, ready for sheetrock. Can you see the little girl's room yet?

These pictures were taken sometime in mid-December. We did get the sheetrock on the ceiling and I did get the insulation blown in and some fiberglass stuffed into the walls (thanks Don!) before we left for Boston, which was good because I strategically picked the coldest week of the year to tear all the insulation out of our house. Anyway, we could really tell a difference with the new puffy stuff installed, and we took our break happy with the progress.

Since then we've made a little more progress - although I've had to focus on the bedroom and leave the hallway for later - and so I hope to have a floor down by the end of the day tomorrow and a crib assembled in the midst of pleasant pinkness within the next couple of weeks. I'll post the rest of the pictures in Part 2, coming soon.