The old screen porch demo day with the tear down of the old walls and building up of the new walls for our all weather sunroom.
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“If you can dream it, you can do it!” – Walt Disney
Years ago a friend sent me a plaque with this quote to hang on my office wall as I came to the end of one career and started a new journey as a blogger and stay at home mom and wife. As I sat down to write this post this morning about tearing out our screen porch room for the new sunroom it just seemed to catch my attention and was appropriate for taking on this challenge in our home.
Renovating our screen porch room to a full all weather sunroom has been a dream of ours for some time.
Taking this dream from just a daydream to reality actually started last Fall. We hired a contractor in November, picked out new windows for the house, and laid out the first plans for the sunroom at the same time.
Then in late January of this year we finally had the windows on the house installed.
Demo day finally arrived in February!
It wasn’t until mid-February when the work began on tearing out the old screen porch and starting the walls for the new sunroom. So this post is actually weeks after the project started but we experienced several weeks of delays between each step, like waiting for the sunroom windows to arrive and waiting for workers to be available.
If you didn’t get a chance to read the post for Week 1, along with the images of how the room looked before we started, here is a photo from last week.
Good thing we didn’t wait until the beginning of the One Room Challenge™ to start this project because we would never have made it happen within the 8 weeks of posts for the challenge.
So demo day for the old screen porch was actually in February and not May.
On a still very cold day in February, a couple of workers showed up and spent a day ripping out the screens, lattice panels, old doors, and the framing of our run down screen porch room.
Demo day of the old screen porch walls didn’t take very little long as you can imagine. Demo is always faster than the actual build.
Then the next day the work crews came back and built the framing for the new walls. I also worked very closely with the foreman on the placement of the new sliding door, the door to the outdoor pen, the dog door, the locations of the new electrical plugs and size of the large windows in the two walls.
The size of the windows determined where the actual doors were to be located.
The plan was to have as large of windows as we could fit in the walls to keep the open feel and look of the room and to keep the view of the outdoors.
Now is a good time to mention another upcoming project as a side note:
As you can see in these photos the back yard area for the dog pen is also in need of some TLC.
The concrete blocks will be replaced by wood steps leading to a 12′ x 12′ deck in the enclosure. The raised section of deck from the old pool will be torn down because it is rotting and falling apart anyway. The back fence will be taken down and moved about 10 feet back on the property to create a much larger dog pen and run area for our four dogs.
This part of our plans will not be a part of the One Room Challenge™ but I did want to mention the upcoming changes to the outdoor space since it is visible in the photos. We expect to be able to tackle that project in July but the availability and price of lumber these days may delay it until the Fall months.
By the end of the third day, they had the lower walls framed and the electrical lines run for the new plugs and the new wall mounted heating and air conditioner unit.
After that, the order for another set of custom windows was placed and we started the waiting game for windows again. The expected timeframe was at least a 4 week wait.
So at this point in the project, we waited.
During the weeks I waited for the new windows and the available work crew, I started drawing new floorplans based on the new layout of the doors and windows. I also spent countless hours online shopping for mid-century room ideas and furnishings or visiting thrift stores in our area.
Vintage and mid-century items are expensive these days!
With some of my thrift store finds, I started some small DIY furniture and décor projects for the room as well.
I will be sharing those projects along with the continued work on the room in the next few posts.
Hugs,
Luke 6:45 “What you say flows from what is in your heart.”
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