Next up: dining room

We're not quite done with the parlour yet - we have to fill in some gaps with caulk, barf - but we thought we'd just move along anyway (caulk can do itself, eventually).
So here is our ugly, but soon to be beautiful, dining room:

Dan is excited to do some demo

Dan already took the door trim off so we could get our couch through, hehe

wallpaper. It has the texture of contact paper.

This room also has a radiator. Quite nice one, actually.

 

upside down mushroom from Mario Brothers

 We had this idea to salvage the plaster walls, seeing as how they're considered high-end features and also would seriously minimize the work we'd have to do, but...

crumbles

 Once we peeled off the wallpaper, we found the plaster beneath was very crumbly, full of horsehair, and not at all worth salvaging. I don't even know how we'd go about salvaging these. Also, we found out that plaster walls are usually (?) ~1 inch thick and comprised of 2 layers: a coarse underlayer (traditionally has horsehair in it) and smooth overlayer. Our walls are at most 3/8" thick - I found parts of the walls during demo that were 1/4" thick; shoddy workmanship, I tell you!! - and only has the coarse (under)layer.

So we demo-ed away, and it didn't take as long as before (only 1 evening) because we decided to leave the lath in. Since the blown-in insulation looks like it's in pretty good shape, we're going to keep that too! But partway through demo...

what is that?!

What the...

 After Dan got his job, he promised he'd reward himself with new sneakers. You see, these sneakers were used, hand-me-downs from our previous roommate Justin...sneakers which he received 5 years ago. After a few years of heavy use and the rubber soles were worn down, we thought it was about time to get new sneakers. After the rubber flap fell off the soles last year and he kept getting stuff stuck in the middle hole (he fondly called it his road kill cause that's what it looked like), we thought it was definitely time to get new sneakers. Now that he can't stand straight on the left shoe, when he puts weight on it, he's off-balance and it puts strain on his ankle....we will get new sneakers ASAP.

Anyway, here are some demo pictures:

covered the doorways with plastic to keep dust in and cats OUT (not so successful with the latter objective)

fan blowing out window makes demo much more pleasant