Demoing & Reframing The Laundry Room: a house log

Let us talk about knocking out a few walls and framing a few new ones, shall we?

For two weeks we had virtually no progress in our laundry area, except for rethinking our approach and considering contractor bids. So by comparison, things happened so swiftly over the last few days that it nearly put our heads on spin cycle. What began out looking like this…

…is now looking a bit more like this. Yowza.

Let us rewind to early last week, when it clicked that perhaps we could do more ourselves and sub-contract certain jobs out instead of relying entirely on one contractor and his team. As you may recall from this post, Option 4 is our goal:

We put together a to-do list for all of the tasks ahead of us and chose to take this approach: do what we are capable of and when we get to a line item that is outside our comfort zone, call in a pro. Here is what that list looked like (I brought in an asterisk to the items we have hired out or are considering hiring out):

• Move washer & dryer and remove cabinetry
• Demo cased opening, side wall, back wall, part of the floor and the attic step
• Frame new walls & doorways*
• Move laundry plumbing hook-ups & drains*
• Move laundry electrical (plus other lights, switches, and outlets)*
• Move dryer vent
• Hang drywall
• Add insulation
• Mud, tape, and sand all the drywall seams in the new room*
  
• Rehang laundry door
• Add new frosted door to attic
• Prime & paint laundry room and hallway walls
• Tile & grout new laundry floor
• Add baseboard and door casings
• Add upper cabinetry and shelving
• Tile & grout laundry room backsplash
• Reinstall washer & dryer
• Add lower cabinet
• Add ceiling light fixture
• Hang art, ironing board, and bring in other laundry room items
• Finishing touches and repairs (drywall in garage, step in attic, etc)

You already saw that we moved the appliances, so let us talk demo – which began on Tuesday, with a careful prying off of all of the baseboards and trim so that we can hopefully reuse some of it.

Next came drywall demo, which only involved the cased opening at this point (we were trying to leave the walls to the storage room intact as long as possible to keep the A/C in). As for the actual demo-tools I used, I knocked things out with a rubber mallet and pried things off with a crowbar.

As for clean-up, I have been sweeping small stuff into garbage bags and collecting a pile of the big stuff in the attic. At some point I will get either a small dumpster or another Bagster (I quite much look forward to hurling things out the storage room window into the trash bin below – although we can reuse some items, like some studs and trim).

Next on the demo list was removing the old cased opening framing.

This likely required the most brute force of anything – plenty of hammering at 2x4s and prying nails apart. Slowly but surely things came down.

Once that was all out of the way, we took out the upper cabinet so the space was officially empty.

Demo was not simply limited to walls, though. I also had to remove some of the hardwood flooring since the framing for our new laundry room wall needed to be attached directly to the subfloor. It was a little weird to be tearing out floors that we had laid simply last year, but whatchagonnado?

Since we used Elastilon to lay our floors (in short a big adhesive sheet) it was not the same process as prying out nailed planks. I managed to pry off the first few pieces with a flat-head-screwdriver-turned-chisel (that Elastilon is ridiculously sticky) and then it began to lift up in sheets.

At that point I was able to separate it sufficient to get my knife in and slice through the Elastilon layer underneath, and eventually I could remove the exact section I needed. I also took out the particle board subfloor so that the plywood was ready for framing. Looks excellent, no?

The process of removing the floor confirmed one change to our plan that we had been contemplating for a few days: bumping the frosted door to the storage room (aka: future bunk/TV room) forward a bit. So rather than it sitting in the existing back wall, it will be framed to go right where the hardwood floors end. Not only does this save us from having to extend the hardwoods (we are thinking we will do carpet in the TV room) but it also shortens the already-quite-long hallway a smidge. Thirdly, it will create a small vestibule at the entryway of the TV room for the door to swing into (rather than into the middle of the room), which may make furniture placement in the room easier down-the-line.

My last demo step before framing began was prying (and cutting) out the single attic step that was in the way. I will rebuild it on the other side of the platform later.

That was as much demo as our framing guy recommended doing before he arrived (we used David of Chicas Construction, who helped us raise our sunroom ceiling last year). Obviously there are still more walls that need to come down, but we all agreed it would be best to leave them up for as long as we could (again, to keep the hot storage room from overworking our AC). The last half of the framing could not be completed until the plumbing and electrical was moved anyway (which could not be moved until the first part of the framing had been completed) so we consistently knew framing would be tackled in two parts. So it simply made sense to do demo in two parts to go along with that.

On Wednesday morning it looked like this…

…and less than three hours later we had two new walls thanks to David.

After observing him work his magic, I am fairly sure it is a task I could’ve managed, but it certainly would’ve taken me MUCH longer. And since he was so speedy, we were able to have the plumbers (Scott & Mike’s Plumbing Services) out simply hours later to disconnect the old hook-ups and add new ones.

It only took them about 3 hours to make the change, especially since all of this sits above our garage – giving them straightforward access to everything without making a big mess inside the house. Of course, they still had to cut out a big section of our garage ceiling, so we do have that repair on our to-do list. But we have been talking about drywalling the whole garage (two big side walls are unfinished anyway) so we might try to get it all done at once.

Having that area cut open in fact made life easier for the electricians (S J Ryan Electric), who arrived the next morning. They were able to move the laundry outlets in a flash, but there was still plenty to be done in terms of moving light fixtures, switches, and outlets.

For instance, putting a ceiling light in the laundry room (with a switch at the future laundry doorway) and moving some of the storage room lighting & switches. Sherry and I brainstormed where we hoped everything to be moved ahead of time (time is money when people work by the hour) and were able to come up with a pleasant solid plan for relocating everything so it makes sense. For example, now we have a light above the attic stairs, an outlet in the future laundry room to plug in our iron, and a fixture box in the laundry room that will be centered in the room after we add upper cabinets (if we hadn’t been thinking we would have simply centered it in the room but after the upper cabinets were hung it would have felt off-center since it would be closer to them than the other walls).

 

That was all done by Thursday afternoon, so we called our framer to come back out to finish framing on Friday buuuuuuut… he had food poisoning. He’s like the nicest guy ever so he was saying he would come out on Saturday or Sunday if he was feeling better, but we told him not to worry. We hoped him to focus on feeling better and, well, we had other messes to make over the weekend. The good news is he’s here this morning (feeling much better) to finish everything up so we can hopefully start hanging drywall soon!

With the plumbing and electrical stuff relocated, it was time to proceed with the second phase of demo, so I had some lively with that over the weekend.

 

First I bashed down some drywall, which fortunately came down in fairly big sheets for the most part (hence my growing pile of trash/reuse items that you can see near the window). Speaking of the window, here is our first peek at the daylight we will be getting into the hallway now.

I could also take down a bit more of the framing too – namely the old wall with the storage room door in it, which would give us our first real feel for what the new laundry room will be like. Do not mind the dangling outlet boxes. The electricians brought in them in a way that makes them straightforward to be set right into the freshly framed wall that David is working on right now for us.

Here is the same area with the framing down (and white lines brought in to remind you where the last wall will be framed in). It is feeling ever-so-slightly like a room.

I could also take out part of the other wall, since the area with the old washer hook-ups will now simply open into the storage room. The plumbing was all disconnected already, but the plumbers left the old pipes in the wall for me to remove during demo. All it took was some cutting with my reciprocating saw and it all came down…

And that, my friends, is how we got to the picture that you saw at the beginning of the post.

The next step construction-wise is going on right now, which is getting those remaining two walls framed – both the one to close off the laundry room, and the one for the frosted door into the storage room. I whipped up a little GIF to assist show what I mean (David does it nearly this fast):

I realize that is still not crystal clear, so I will make one last attempt by showing you an updated version of the floor plan. I cannot tell you how satisfying it was to change the “Current Laundry” label to “Former Laundry.”

Once framing is complete, we’d enjoy to hop right into drywalling (which we are going to give a go ourselves – although our mudding skills could use some practice) but we need to cross of some other little items first, like rerouting the dryer vent.

• Move washer & dryer and remove cabinetry
• Demo cased opening, side wall, back wall, part of the floor and the attic step
• Frame new walls & doorways*
• Move laundry plumbing hook-ups & drains*
• Move laundry electrical (plus other lights, switches, and outlets)*
• Move dryer vent
• Hang drywall
• Add insulation
• Mud, tape, and sand all the drywall seams in the new room*
  
• Rehang laundry door
• Add new frosted door to attic
• Prime & paint laundry room and hallway walls
• Tile & grout new laundry floor
• Add baseboard and door casings
• Bring washer & dryer back in and hook them up (and party like it is 1999)
• Add upper cabinetry and shelving
• Tile & grout laundry room backsplash
• Reinstall washer & dryer
• Add lower cabinet
• Add ceiling light fixture
• Hang art, ironing board, and bring in other laundry room items
• Finishing touches and repairs (drywall in garage, step in attic, etc)

I will leave you with the last shot I took before taping up a few big drop cloths to keep the hot attic air at bay. It is some glorious, glorious natural light that is at last shining on that end of the hallway.

Oh, and we owe you a cost update too. Perhaps in our next post once we have the final bill from the framer? So far his estimate, plus the totals for the plumbing and the electrical assist are looking strong compared to the line items in our two contractor estimates.

What did you folks do this weekend? Did anyone else wield a rubber mallet and tell some drywall who is boss?