Master Bedroom, Part I: Tear it Down

It’s been over two months since we posted. We could offer excuses and apologies, but instead we’ll just say that we finished the master bedroom and it kicked our butts. Now that we have *mostly* recovered, we’ll begin to tell the tale.

Part I: Tear it Down

The day we first toured the house (and instantly fell in love with it…and decided to buy it) we knew that painting the master bedroom was HIGH on the to-do list. It was bright reddish pink. Magenta even. A Magenta Master. And it had to go. Upon moving our furniture into the room, we also realized that because of the location of the air vent, we couldn’t put our king-sized bed on the main wall…we had to put it on a shorter wall that wasn’t quite wide enough to accommodate the bed and both our night stands. We thought we’d stick it out for a few weeks until we had the HVAC updated and then we could move the bed where we wanted. Only it wasn’t that simple.

Over time, we came to realize that we weren’t sleeping well. In fact, we were sleeping terribly. We were rolling into the center of the bed every night, and trying to get out of the bed each morning was like scrambling to get out of a hole. It turns out (surprise, surprise) that the floor was incredibly uneven.

After much debating, we decided we needed to fix the master bedroom floor before starting on our originally planned first big project: the master bath.

In order to access the floor, we had to move out. Which means we had to empty the living room of all the boxes so we could use it as our temporary bedroom while we fixed the floor. Living in the living room was a whole experience that we will discuss later. Let’s just say the conditions were not ideal.

Once we had the master empty, we (I) wasted no time in tearing out the carpet. Just like every homeowner who purchases an old house, we crossed our fingers and prayed that somewhere underneath were original hardwoods. Well there were…sort of. Directly under the carpet and carpet pad (which was basically rotten) was a layer of particle board. PARTICLE BOARD! Why??? WHY??? One drop of moisture and particle board expands like crazy. No wonder the floor wasn’t level. But before tearing up the particle board, I had to do something just as important: paint over that bright magenta with some primer, so that whatever color we eventually painted our master retreat would be calming and sleep-inducing and not at all red.

Next, before tearing up any more of the floor, we decided this was the perfect time to scrape the popcorn off the ceiling (why do they call it popcorn?). In the past, in other houses we’ve worked on, this job has been a giant headache. But apparently, this ceiling didn’t like the popcorn any more than we did, so I made fairly quick work of it. After that we put on two coats of bright white paint and already the room felt lighter.

As I swept up the debris from scraping the ceiling, I found a sweet note written on the floor: “Jesus Love You Johnny Eddie 1/3/95 Carpet.” We have no idea who Johnny and Eddie are, but it still made us smile, and I suppose it’s good to know that the carpet was installed in 1995.

Next it was time to pull up the particle board. Except particle board doesn’t like it when you do that. In fact, it throws a giant tantrum and explodes into tiny, splintery pieces. When I tell you this was backbreaking work, I’m only barely kidding. Trey put in the lion’s share of the work tearing it all up and I hauled the pieces to the dumpster.

Oh yeah, we rented a dumpster. A giant dumpster. That sat in the center of our front yard for months. It was there so long that we gave directions to people by saying it was the house with the dumpster. But man did we fill it up!

With the particle board gone, we slowly peeled away the moisture barrier paper that was beneath it to reveal ORIGINAL HARDWOODS!!! YAY!!!

That joy was short lived.

Turns out, the original wood we found was subfloor: tongue and groove 120 year-old subfloor that had been patched with plywood that wasn’t quite the same thickness. Again, no wonder the floor wasn’t level. So we ripped it out. If we thought tearing out the particle board was bad, we weren’t prepared for the work it would take to remove the subfloor.

When it was finally done, it revealed ancient 2×8 floor joists that spanned the 15 ft room. If you know anything about building codes, you know that that’s not okay. In the center of each joist, as a brace of some sort, there were angled pieces of 2×4. I suppose a hundred years ago that might have provided some support, but after all this time those joists bounced like a birthday party at Big Air. Check out the video below – it was terrifying!

Every layer we peeled back revealed another layer that needed to be removed and replaced. So, while we were hoping for just ripping out the carpet, we ended up demolishing it all, right down to the dirt under the house. And that was just the beginning…