Demo Day - and Days and Days and Days: Living Room Edition!

Ah, our living room! It was so empty that it looked relatively okay on first glance, but the devil is in the details, y'all. And that striped wallpaper. 

Both the back wall in the living room and the kitchen were covered in this paneling.

The most noticeable issue with this room was the missing wall sconce. As we got closer to the wall, we could tell there was a soft spot around where the sconce should have been, which we found out was due to water intrusion. The wall also looks "normal" but it was covered in a wallpaper that had a burlap kind of texture. 

And of course there is the gargantuan fireplace that jutted out into the room literally almost three feet (34 inches to be exact - yeesh!).

At first distracted by the smoke stained walls (and those french doors - hello, beauties!), you don't realize that this wall is not actually a wall made of plaster or drywall. No, the plaster wall is behind the plywood (plywood?) that covers up this entire wall. (And UGH, the smell when we took the plywood down!)

So, now that you have the backstory on this seemingly innocent and easy-to-remedy room, let's get this demo party stttaaarrrtttteeeedddd!

Prying off the paneling was super easy, pretty quick and really fun! 

The satisfaction of hearing the "pop" with each piece of paneling being removed - so good!

R.I.P. wood paneling wall, R.I.P. 

We also removed the plywood behind the paneling. This room just loved its plywood! 

I feel like you guys should literally be able to smell this wall. UGH, it was so bad - smelled like poop once we removed the plywood!

With plywood being placed on this entire wall (again, why?), we were quite nervous about what we were going to find behind it. Was there going to even be any wall left? Was it just studs? Or huge gaping holes? So, once we removed the plywood and were left with this wall, it only added to our perplexion as to why this plywood was here in the first place. The only decent idea we came up with is it was put up so items could be hung on the wall without creating tons of holes in the plaster (I mean, have y'all ever tried to hammer a nail into plaster? It's not the best thing for your wall.). 

Once the paneling wall and plywood from the stinky poop wall were removed, it was time to demo this area to get to the bottom of the soggy wall by the missing sconce and get rid of this bad boy (aka, the fireplace)! 

Just as we were nervous to remove the plywood on the opposite wall, we were also nervous to see what kind of damage the water intrusion had done on the wall behind the fireplace.

You can see the darker wood on the left hand side - darker because it was actively wet. 

You can also see that there was some rot to the studs and wood right above the fireplace. 

And there's Clayton demoing the ugly 80s brick fireplace, only to find another equally as ugly fireplace behind it! With Birtha being built in 1928, I was pretty positive that this rock climbing-esque fireplace was not the original. 

And it wasn't! There is my beautiful baby - Birtha's original brick fireplace! I was SO excited!

Clayton continued to demo the two fireplaces on top of our sweet original fireplace with the jackhammer, and eventually, Matt and Clayton were able to get a huge chunk of the rock fireplace off. With Matt's awesome luck of things almost falling on him, you can bet I was nervous for these two removing this very heavy rock right above their fragile tootsies. (But I still took a photo.)

We discovered square red tiles that were hidden by the first fireplace's huge hearth, and I wanted to remove and replace the tiles with something else. (The old fireplace tiles up North - like our first DIY demo and reno home in Louisville, KY - are so much more intricate and beautiful than the ones down here.) But THEN, I found out that these tiles are what places some Jacksonville history happening right in our very own living room! SO NOW I CAN'T REMOVE THEM (but I don't care because I love their history waaaayyyyyy more than I dislike their ugly color and blandlessness).

Once we got to this point in the fireplace demo, there was hot debate (okay, it wasn't really that hot of a discussion, but we were all very sweaty) about whether or not the bricks on this hearth were original. I was in Camp Nay, Clayton was in Camp Yay. With all of the demo dust, it was hard to see the color and style of the bricks. They seemed to be red in some places - so like the original fireplace - but yellow in others (like the first fireplace) and we were able to find parts where their "consistency" wasn't like the original fireplace bricks. Because of that, I was pretty confident they weren't original and Camp Nay asked Camp Yay to "please remove the bricks, good sir!" 

Camp Yay happily obliged, as seen below. (I'd also like to note that there was another debate about whether or not to remove the bricks on the hearth's level that were inside the fireplace. They be gone.) 

Here's where you can really see the impact of removing the two fireplaces! The first fireplace's hearth just ate up so much of this space! Not to mention, could you imagine cracking a toe on the corner of that thing? YOWZA!

See! I told you we removed the plywood from the paneled wall! We also removed all the plaster and lathe from the fireplace wall - FUN!

Just beat at it with a crowbar, babe!

And right about here - with that daylight peeking through along the fireplace wall - is where our living room demo ends. 

So what do you guys think of our demoed living room? Can you imagine coming over for a game night in this space? Or perhaps allowing the breeze coming from the gaping hole in the wall to rustle your hair to give you that Beyonce look? Or maybe even using the demoed lathe as kindling in our newly uncovered fireplace? THERE ARE JUST SO MANY POSSIBILITIES.

All jokes aside (Jokes? Who said those were jokes?), we still have quite a few more rooms/spaces to share the demolition of, but for the next post, I'm going to switch it up on you guys and explain just what history those red fireplace tiles uncovered!