Today marked the start of the demolition on the den paneling. We started after the little dude went down for his first nap. Probably not the smartest judgement call but he lasted an hour before waking up to the sound of trim being ripped off. In typical fashion, I didn’t really get very good pictures of what it looked like normally. The best I could find was an old picture from a few years ago.
As of this morning, it looked like this:
And then we pulled two of the three walls off before Gabriel had a melt-down. He’s gotten to the frustrating separation anxiety stage where I can hardly put him down and leave the room for a minute without the dramatic water-works show. But I digress… Here are today’s after shots.
And then Mike noticed that there were old ivy vines growing IN the insulation (dead, thank God)! When we first bought the house, we had ivy growing on that side of the house which we promptly killed and ripped up. A back-breaking job, but it had to be done because it was growing into the siding. I had no idea it had made its way into the wall! Good times. A message to anyone thinking that English ivy is a pretty landscaping choice: You’re out of your freakin’ mind. Stay away!
Tomorrow we aim to tear down the window wall, and take out the old, paper-thin insulation. I’m a little nervous about what we’ll find behind that wall because we had a yellow jacket nest on that side of the house that I’m pretty sure made it’s way into that corner. So I’m fully prepared to find two-year-old nasty yellow jacket carcases along with the old nest! Wish us luck.
