Wall Repair And The Little Window That Could

My demo to-do list in the laundry room started off pretty small. 1. trash/donate junk 2. remove shelves and pantry 3. remove baseboards 4. build an entirely new wall. ha! just kidding about number four. That was NOT on my list, but somehow completing something as simple as removing the baseboards led to us having to hire a “fontractor” (faux contractor) to demo and rebuild a large portion of the wall in the laundry room.

Here’s some back story: As I started to do my thing and remove the baseboard in the laundry room, the one along the exterior wall was soggy, and crumbled away in my hands as if Thanos had snapped his fingers at just that very same moment. Holy crap we found a huge leak behind the wall! How do I know? Because I’m a genius and truth be told, I legit turned into a mad woman and started hammering away at the wall and ripping apart drywall to uncover the problem. True story, the girls pulled up their little fold chairs and took a seat outside the laundry room to watch the show. I love them! Anyway, after my discovery, and after some thorough research we later learned this leak was due to a poor roofing job where a proper overhang wasn’t added to the roof’s edge. (We also had an awning that played a supporting role in this catastrophe). So throughout the years rain had been slowly seeping behind the wall instead of over and into the gutter. This left us with soggy and rotted wood siding that felt like a wet sponge to the touch. (Struggle photos alert. Bear with me as I get use to being a “blogger”. I’ll take better pictures. Scouts honor).

Ugh, I never would’ve guessed that this was what was happening behind our walls. How could our house deceive us!

We ended up hiring out for the repair work because this was well beyond our expertise. Our “fontractor” (aka a guy that works on houses and does this stuff on the side and now he’ll be our go to for everything) did an amazing job rebuilding the wall. And in addition to that we also asked him to remove the fugly awning above our back door, replace the gutters and remove our little baby window.

B E F O R E

P R O G R E S S

C U R R E N T L Y

Here’s where we’re at today. Look at our cute wittle baby Pella window. So, I initially wanted to widen the opening to add a much larger window, but we were told by a Pella representative that it wouldn’t make much of a difference in terms of the amount of light that entered the room. We decided to stick with the size it was framed for in order to save on cost. Next we’ll need to add a j-channel to the frame of the window and we’ll of course need to address the siding. Removing the awning and changing up the window really shows how beat up it is in some areas. Maybe we’ll DIY-it and install all-new siding ourselves? Or maybe we’ll just make repairs and paint what we have? Who knows.