You've Been Framed

In my last entry I posted a picture of our little load of boards and mentioned that it was going to be used to begin framing one of the rooms. Well, framing has begun and the lucky room is (drum roll please)....Mark's study, aka the front bedroom! Here is the progression so far:

We were only able to get one photo of the room before the previous owner had moved out, and it had to be taken from the hallway because there was so much junk in there that we weren't able to get in any closer for a photo.
Same corner of the room post move out, pre demo. The room may be empty of all the junk, but it's still such a depressing room with the light purple painted paneling, drop ceiling, ugly curtains, dust webs all over, etc.

Teeny, tiny corner closet. If you look really closely you can see the SOLD sign on the for sale sign out front.

East and south walls and door out to the hallway.

Horrible drop ceiling.

Demolition begins! Purple paneling gone!

The south wall now has a view of the bathroom!

Drop ceiling gone.

Demo complete. The ceiling is down to the beams and the pile of rubble is gone!

When Mark was tearing out the ceiling, he found several layers of insulation, including this terrible vermiculite stuff, which he said is similar to cat liter. Unfortunately, after some Internet research, he found that it likely contains asbestos. He was careful to wear a mask when he removed it, but he didn't when he was sweeping it up afterward. This is obviously extremely concerning to us, and Mark plans to take some extra precautions when removing the rest of it.

The east and south wall down to the lath and plaster.

Framed!

Mark tore out the teeny tiny corner closet (you can see the outline of where it used to be on the floor and appreciate the smallness of it). He's going to frame that little space on the east wall into a niche for his printer and some file drawers. The rest of the wall will be cut out for French doors that will open into the living room. The original doorway on the south wall will be closed in and that whole wall will be bookshelves for our hundreds of books or at least some of them!

While tearing out the teeny tiny closet, some rolled up papers dropped out, one of which was this Mighty Ram poster. Maybe we'll keep it for when the kids go to Highland!

The other rolled up papers were these drawings, which appear to be plans for a plane. We remembered that one of the cards that fell out when Mark was tearing down the ceiling in this room (see the Fun Finds post) was the kid's I.D. card from the Anchorage International Airport. It appears he worked there in '78 in "equipment service" - maybe a summer job while he was going to college. Apparently he was into airplanes.
So that's the progress on the room so far. Since I took the pictures of the framing, Mark has actually made even more progress installing the some insulation and running some of the electrical wires. He keeps plugging away at it each night, and hopefully soon we'll have some pictures of another complete or near complete room!

And lastly...now that it's October, it's time to get out the Halloween decorations. Good thing I found this down in one of the crawl spaces in the basement.

I actually really love this little pumpkin decoration, and once Halloween's over, I think I'll try to scan it, touch it up a little and print a couple copies of it on card stock to use next year!
Happy October everyone!