Spring Break! or Rippin' into the old house again

I love our livingroom. When I see this picture I want to go sit there. It is cozy and comfortable. This week we tore it all apart. Look closely at the second picture. It shows four little screws protruding down through the ceiling from the crawlspace. These were placed there by our roofer FIVE YEARS AGO when he installed a new roof and skylight for the living room. All we needed to do was cut and finish access to it. Simple enough, right?












Here is a shot of the hole cut and insulation added. See the blinds? Those are new, too, and work on a switch. They can open, close or completely retract.










This is the work in progress. No pain, no gain. Now there is sheetrock covering the insulation. Air circulation is not the greatest in these access chutes, so we rigged a box fan set across chairs blowing UP. Sorry, no picture, but I'm sure you can see it in your mind's eye.

Since all of the furniture was either moved out or covered in plastic I hauled this favorite chair off to the upholstery shop. Okay, this chair is nice, but you'd really be raving about it had you seen what it looked like BEFORE I took it there. However, since I am the Worst Blogger Ever I neglected to take a picture of it in its gold wide wale corduroy glory with the sunken seat. The best thing about that fabric was that it matched the cat who thinks it is Her Chair. Anyway, the red Jamestown Lounge Feudal Oak chair is great in the room.

The finished room! This picture may not show the beauty of the natural light that fills the room, even on a gloomy day (common around here) in the late afternoon it was lovely. It was four days of disruption and mess but our question was, "Why didn't we do this sooner?" Our next planned project is to refinish the livingroom floor. That will wait until summer. Our heavy Jamestown Lounge Feudal Oak livingroom furniture has taken a toll on the floor. It has rubbed off the finish and started marring the wood beneath. There was also an incident with a leaky Christmas tree that happened a couple of years ago that discolored a part of the wood. Meanwhile, we shall enjoy the latest improvement.