We’ve been benched! Chapter 1

In honor of Super Bowl Sunday, Dr. J and I decided to bench ourselves….rather, bench our rather useless window seat in our Master Bedroom.  So we decided to celebrate by practicing a little DEMOLITION!  It was our first demo project in the house and it was a doozy!  Remember this pic from our Nickel Tour below?

It’s a view of our Master Bedroom bay window seat, which wins some touchdowns for being one of the only architectural features in our house.  However, it’s being benched for some serious fouls and losing points for being a vast waste of space and having zero to NO functionality at all.  Window Seat, FAIL!  There, I said it!  It serves no purpose!  Now, I’m all about having something look good over functionality (like when we installed beadboard on the back of our kitchen island several months back), but to have a window seat with no storage?  Wasteful!  The bench itself is a prominent feature in our bedroom, it extends to the floor and, when you stand outside, you can see that there is “space” under the bench – why not make it functional – i.e. storage-able?  This is a project that’s been on our minds since before we moved in and we were kind of putting it off as something that wasn’t “mission critical”.  Then I had to open my big fat mouth this weekend saying that I wanted to paint it because I’m on a kick right now to paint our window sills in the house because it looked a little like this before this weekend:

But Dr. J insisted, “Well, before you paint it we need to repair it…ah hell, let’s just rip the whole damn thing out!”  This is what happens when you have a fearless husband and a wife who just goes along with it..

We knew we were going to do it eventually, but we also knew that we couldn’t go into it with a plan because we had no idea what we were going to find underneath the finish work.  That’s a little frightening for any would be DIY-er, but somehow we worked up the guts to just kind of get it out of the way this past weekend.  Some of the questions we kept asking ourselves while we were donning crowbars and hammers included; would it be filled with insulation?  Were we going to have to insulate it ourselves?  Was there drywall already down there?  Would we have to pull out a bunch of electrical work, etc?  So we decided to cross our fingers, take the plunge, and just whack away it.

The first thing we did was to remove the MDF “window seat”, which was actually two pieces with a rather large (and oh-so-obvious) seam right down the center.  When we ripped up the MDF board (very carefully, I might add, we don’t want to make those complicated cutouts for the windows!), we discovered that there was a large piece of plywood underneath – d’oh!  It’s like when people are trying to get out of a maze on TV and they end up getting the door open only to find another door behind it – curses!  But we weren’t deterred!  We figured if we’ve come this far, the worst that could happen is we would open up the plywood and find gerbils or something living in that space.  There has to be usable space in there somewhere!  We felt a little like Archaeologists on a dig – not sure what we’re going to find, but pretty sure it’s going to be a treasure trove when we do:

Since we had this plywood staring us straight in the face, we did a little “reverse construction” by following the secret trail of breadcrumbs….er….nails.  We looked at where the large woodworking nails had been placed and deduced that there were probably studs beneath the plywood that those nails were attached to.  Always an important tip if you do a demo project like this.  Remember, somebody had to put it together, so it can absolutely be taken apart!  Just be smart about how you “de-construct” something – you wouldn’t want to cut wires or make a bigger job for yourself in the end.  So we decided to just go for it and cut a hole to see what was under there!

But what, pray tell, is *in* that hole?

Nothing….JACKPOT!  Well, almost….now we have to get through all of that pesky plywood and there’s no easy way to say this, but just brace yourselves for a mess!

Now that we had the space opened up, Dr. J began to formulate a plan and at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, we finally made our trip to Lowe’s to get all of our supplies.  We’ll be updating throughout the week as we finish up what we started above.

Stay tuned this week as we show you just what our Super Bowl weekend ended up looking like and, might I add, it’s another lifechanger indeed!