70s Den...Meet the 21st Century (Phase 1)

Happy Autumn everyone. We got our first snow on Sunday.

The plan--get Phase 1 of the den transformation done before it gets chilly out. Phase 1 is to be a CHEAP and QUICK change to the den.

1) Remove gas heater
2) Remove built-in shelves
3) Remove cork tiles
4) Prime, paint, and put the built-ins back up

Easy enough right? Somehow a quick two-weekend, four-step project INSTEAD took a month, with work being done several hours almost every day in some way. I will note that we took a weekend off to go to Vail to relax in a nice mountain home up there that a friend of ours can score for the weekend from time to time. Beautiful snow and turning leaves up there, so it was a good break from the dust and paint smell from our house that I'm pretty sure was making Jamie and I feel both sick and high for about three weeks.

But I digress. Here's what really happened:

1) Remove 60s style heater. Besides being an eyesore, our house inspector noted there was a "MINOR gas leak" on the unit. Not sure what that means, but William--Chelsea fan with a thick London accent--from Brothers Plumbing came and helped me remove this dinosaur of a heater and cap the gas line without blowing up the house.

2) Remove built-ins.

3) Remove nasty cork tiles.

4) Attempt to scrape off cork residue and remaining cork tile crust.

5) Realize that 30-year-old cork tile epoxy doesn't evaporate on any part of the wall that is below ground level. The only option? Cordon off the area, knock down wall, and put up new drywall. (Thanks to Twinkie for helping me lift the drywall and even carry a piece of it on the ski rack of my VW--both of us holding an edge out the window! Sorry, no pictures of that.)

6) Paint.

7) Paint.

8) Paint.

9) Almost a month later and just in time for colder weather, enjoy your half-done room by upgrading your tv (new shelving layout wouldn't hold the old 96lb Trinitron!) and watch the Rockies in the World Series.

Phase 2, to be done sometime in 2008 hopefully, will involve moving the electric heaters, rerouting the stairs to permit for a normal place for a couch (and futher back from tv, which has been a problem), remove the last of the ugly brown carpet that used to completely cover the floors in our house, and install a railing on both the stairs and the ledge to the den. Hopefully it will be much easier than this phase :)