The back hall/laundry room was a project that really spawned off of another project.  While I was working on the exterior of the house, I discovered sections of siding that were badly damaged and needed to be replaced.  Because the back hall was on the exterior of the house at one point in time, the walls were cedar clapboard siding.  It had been on the interior of the house for so long, it was still in really good shape.  I proceeded to take it all down and used what I could on the outside of the house.

After doing this, the hallway looked pretty bad.  Underneath the siding were ¾” thick planks, and a lot of electrical wiring.  You can see some of the knob-and-tube wiring that was feeding the lights in the back hall, as well as newer wiring that ran throughout the house.  While I was working on the outside of the house, I also had an electrician upgrade my service so that I could add central air.  The guy did a terrific job, replacing and moving the breaker box, pulling all that wiring down to the basement, and removing some wiring that was, at best, in violation of code.  He also ran some new wiring for lights and switches in the back hall, along with a couple of things for other rooms in the house.

You can see in one section of the wall the remnants of a window.  When we moved in, there was a window in the bathroom that looked through to the back hall.  When my parents had the bathroom remodeled, the contractor removed most of the window but left some pieces of the frame and the sill in the wall.  Again while working on the outside, I found a window sill that was rotted.  I’ll tell the whole story on the siding/painting page, but for purposes of this page, I carefully cut out the sill and reused it to replace the rotten one.  This allowed me to remove the rest of the window frame, fill in with 2x4’s, and drywall over it.

As a minor aside, one section of the wall was pretty interesting.  Instead of just being “plain” wood, there were bits of paint, nail heads, and other unusual signs that this wood wasn’t originally used for a wall.  My guess is that this wood was originally part of a work bench, so after I took it down, I incorporated it into a work bench of my own.  Also interesting was some old plumbing underneath that section of wall.  It looked like there used to be a sink on one side of the wall, but the plumbing is cut off or turned off somewhere.  I decided against going into the crawlspace to figure out where it went.

The ceiling was another story altogether.  As you can see, it was a wainscoting-type ceiling due to the fact that this area used to be part of a back porch.  The bits of plastic are remnants of a somewhat elaborate system created by my mother to catch water that was leaking through from the flat roof above.  After the roof was fixed, the plastic wasn’t required, so I took most of it down.  However, it was so old that a lot of it just fell apart as I was removing it.  I left the remnants and thumbtacks that were holding it in place.  I noticed that the wood for the ceiling extended on into the next room, so I didn’t pull it down at the same time as the walls.

After all this, I left the room as is for several years.  I either didn’t have the time or the money to finish the room, and after doing the drywall in the living room, I really wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle drywall again.  Once Gloria and I got married, we decided to work on finishing this room.  I had some leftover drywall from the living room and this area was really drafty, so we decided to finish the room.

We pulled down the remaining pieces of trim, and started taking down the ceiling, cutting off the wainscoting at the edge of the walls.  Once all that was down, I added additional wiring and boxes on the ceiling.  The wall lights weren’t bad, but we really felt like ceiling fixtures would give us better lighting.  We then added R38 insulation to the exterior sections of the walls & ceiling, filled in any holes to the outside, and caulked any gaps on the exterior walls and the floor.  I mentioned the crawlspace above; the back hall and old back porch are above the crawlspace as opposed to the basement, and it’s pretty drafty.  We sealed up all those gaps and filled in holes in the subfloor to make the area more weatherproof.

After that came the drywall.  Hanging drywall isn’t that big of a deal; finishing it still sucks.  One of the biggest challenges to installing drywall in an old house is that nothing is square or plumb.  You cut a piece of drywall to fit, and it doesn’t because the floor’s not square.  It took multiple attempts to get the drywall to fit fairly well into the space, but we got it.  I decided to finish the drywall myself, and it went ok, but I still have trouble with corners.  I think overall I’m happy with the way the seams and screws came out, but really wish the corners looked better.

Once the drywall was finished, we picked a color and began painting.  The color’s very similar to the dining room, but a slightly different shade.  We thought about putting the old woodwork back up and using basic planks for baseboards, but I found some reproduction Victorian woodwork that is similar to what’s in the rest of the house.  It’s slightly smaller, but I thought it’d look better than basic planks.  I stained it a fairly dark color so that it would flow well from the dining room, and we’re happy with how that came out.

Once all that was done, we moved on to the floor.  I pulled all the old adhesive-backed tiles up off the floor, swept, and started cleaning with the FloorMate before I did anything else.  You can see pictures of one batch of the dirt and gunk that came up off the plank flooring.  I went over the floor several times to try and get as much of the dirt up as possible before putting down the new hardwood.

Gloria and I discussed flooring options before we settled on the hardwood, but ultimately we decided that it’d look better to have hardwood (or a facsimile) than tile.  While we were looking at flooring, the Sam’s Club we go to was remodeling, and had this great 2 ½” flooring in clearance for $27/box.  We decided to pick up enough for the back hall and the kitchen.

Now, I’ve never installed hardwood flooring before, but I figured, hey – how hard could it be?  There are directions, right?  And the answer is:  it’s really not that tough.  I did botch the beginning and had to start over, but once I figured out the routine, I got into a rhythm and it moved pretty quickly.  We rented a flooring nailer from Home Depot, and that worked well for the most part, but when we got closer to the walls, there wasn’t enough room to strike the nailer.  I filled those spots in with my finishing nailer and then surface nailed the last piece or two.  We bought finished quarter round for the edges vs. unfinished, which was a lot more expensive, but it let us get done a lot faster than staining and then installing.

After all that, the room was pretty much done, so we moved things back in.  You can see white scratches on one of the corners.  While we weren’t around when it happened, we theorize that one of the cats was chasing a bug and leapt after it, trying to climb the wall.  We installed a chest freezer, hooked everything back up, and we were good to go.

The last component of this project was getting something back into this room for storage.  For that, we used two utility cabinets that were formerly used in the kitchen.  They’re a little rough and not that pretty, but they work for storage.  I installed a rod at the end of the cabinets for hanging laundry, and a small plastic widget for extra hangers.  As we were moving things back into the laundry room, we realized that we didn’t have as much extra room as we thought we would; the cabinets filled up in a hurry!

Overall, I’m very happy with the way the project turned out.  The next time I attempt drywall, I’m going to feather the corners out a lot more.  I may also paint a test spot, since the paint really brought out the shortcomings in my finishing work.  I still don’t like finishing drywall, but it came out ok.  Installing the hardwood floor was a blast!  I really enjoyed that part of it.  Finally, the compressor and nail guns were great to have!  Installing the baseboards, trim, and quarter round was much, much easier with the nail gun.  Plus it’s fun to use.

Copyright © 2009 David H. Young, Jr. All rights reserved.