Attacking The Wall

Buoyed by the success of our wall-building operation in the home office, we were keen to reward ourselves by making our next job one that promised to be fairly instantly gratifying (because that's how you reward yourself, right? With more jobs?).

Right next to our new home office wall (which you can't see because it's on the other side of the wall on the right of this photo), is this strange little non-Queenslander-ish window in the lounge room. This photo was taken way back when we were redoing the floors.

More recently, when I was finally willing to share pictures of the room with furniture in it, it looked like this. Please forgive how crowded it looks. Those black spindly chairs are not staying.

Since before we even moved into the house, the plan was to get rid of that window and convert it into French doors, to match the doorway we've built in the office. With our doorway-building confidence built up, we decided that it was time to attack this window wall.

We stripped away all of those crazy (and useless) little shelves...

And peeled away the skirting board...

Then removed all of those short VJ boards underneath the window.

And then like magic, a doorway!!!!!

Unfortunately that doorway is neither big enough, nor in the right position, so we moved to cutting through the boards to the left, to widen it.

As always, we have a very sophisticated procedure to avoid making too much mess, involving me holding a vacuum cleaner in one hand and shielding my eyes from sawdust with the other. Don't try this at home. Safety glasses are probably a better option.

After cutting through the boards, it was a fairly simple matter to peel them away, giving us a nice wide doorway!

Here's the view from the other side.

The newly-cut section on the left here is at the right height for the doorway, so it's exactly the same height as the home office doorway. Unfortunately for us, the existing VJs to the right of that, the ones that were above the window, are just a bit too short!

Since we don't really want a join in the VJs in such a conspicuous spot above our new front doorway, there was nothing for it but to peel away the picture rail running horizontally across them so that we could pull them out and replace them with some slightly longer ones.

With a bit of wiggling, they came out.

 Leaving us with this! An extra tall doorway, letting in heaps of light!

We really enjoyed having an unobstructed view of Allie guarding the front steps.

But in amongst all of that VJ board removal, we had to deal with the positioning of the two posts that had been in position on either side of the window, meaning they had to move to flank our new doorway.

We pulled out the acrow prop that had previously held up our precarious old bathroom, to support the ceiling while we moved the post.

We had to saw the top and bottom of it to be able to move it, and then there was quite a lot of shuffling and grunting to get it into its new position.

It only had to move a little way, just so that our new doorway clears the piano, which is along that little wall to the left of the doorway (from this point of view).

Then it was time to move to the other post, to line it up with the new edge of our doorway. The acrow prop came into play again to support the ceiling while we manouevred...

 

More shuffling and grunting...

And there it is! A new extra-wide doorway!

And the view from inside (you can see the edge of the piano covered in that blue blanket on the right)...

Talk about instant gratification! With just a bit of mucking around, we created a doorway in place of that annoying window. It's not very pretty yet, but give us time...