Home Reno

We did some a little bit of home renovation this past weekend. Actually, it was more destruction than renovation.

One of the "features" of our house when we bought it in July, 1997 was the dry sauna in the basement. It was a nice little cedar room with a sauna heater in it. A few days after we moved in, we turned it on, found that it worked, and turned it off again a few minutes later. That was the last time it was used. We've used it primarily as storage ever since, but we're considering getting the basement finished sometime over the next year or two, and we knew that this room was going to be the first thing to go, so we did it ourselves.

On Sunday morning, we removed the door and the drywall from the outside of the right-hand wall and that was about it. Monday morning I took this "before" picture:
By about 2:00 on Monday afternoon, the room was gone, and we had piles of cedar and 2x4 studs piled in our garage. We moved a couple of bookshelves over as well as a loveseat, and now we have a nice little sitting area:

The only drawback is that you can now see the insulation in the walls, where it was hidden before. However, the rest of the basement isn't finished either, so there's insulation all over the place. Other than a couple of tiny cuts on my hand and a few slivers here and there, there were no injuries, and nothing got damaged that wasn't supposed to. The only downside to the day was that it was beautiful outside, possibly the last beautiful weekend of the summer, while we were in the basement all day.