Walled In

We've been hard at work on the back room over the last month and a half, and the finish line is getting closer. This week we put up the paneling on the north wall of the room. This was the only wall in the room that wasn't paneled, and it wasn't exactly done the best whenever the room was added on (it used to just be a porch). You see, instead of removing the siding from the house and putting up insulation and then drywall, they decided to take the easy way out and just cover it up with whatever materials they had on hand. Like this particle board I discovered one day when I decided to take down the wall paper.

 Not exactly the nice, smooth drywall I was expecting to find. So what do you do when someone took the easy way out and just covered up the siding? You take the easy way out too! Well, in this case we did anyway, it just didn't seem worth the time and effort, not to mention money, to take down the wall, remove the siding, insulate, and then put the wall back up again, so we decided to cover it with more paneling. That's right, as much as I hate paneling, I had to admit that this seemed like the best plan. It would make the room look more cohesive and since the original wall wasn't done the best it was a little on the wavy side and we figured the paneling might help hide that a little bit. So we got to work.

We learned a very important lesson very early on with this project, never, never, never buy thin paneling to take home in your truck bed on a day with wind gusts up to 50mph, at least not without some sheets of plywood to help stabilize the paneling. You see, the sheets of paneling that we got were very thin so that they wouldn't bulk up the wall, and they were also 8 feet tall, while our truck bed is only about 7 feet, so they hung out a little on the end, and since they were so thin we didn't want to set anything heavy on them, or tie them down for fear of them ripping (this is where the plywood would have been helpful, we could have just put one underneath the paneling and one on top and then tied them down because of the stabilization factor that the plywood would have added). So we just put them in the truck and hoped for the best. Unfortunately, sometimes the best isn't what you get. We had barely made it out of the Lowes parking lot when one sheet blew out of the truck bed. Jake quickly jumped out of the truck and grabbed it before it flew out onto the busy street, but he had to ride in the truck bed the rest of the way home (we do not condone this kind of behavior, but it was all we could come up with at the time). Thankfully, we only live about 2 miles away from Lowes, so it wasn't a long drive, we would have come up with another solution if it had been any farther. And the only damage was that the sheet got torn a little.

 It really wouldn't have been a big deal to use the torn piece though, because the tear was invisible from the front.

We were able to just cut the end with the tear completely off and use the rest of the undamaged sheet since our ceiling in the back room is only 7 feet 3 inches though. We had to measure and cut very carefully for each sheet of paneling because our ceiling actually slopes a little, so each one was just slightly different.

The panel colors don't match, but that doesn't matter since we're planning to paint them anyway.

It's crazy to say this, but I actually felt that once we got the paneling up it actually improved the look of the room, and I can't wait to get to painting those panels to make it look that much better.

There are just a few more things to do before we can paint and get finished with this room, one of those things being trying to figure out where to put the stuff we have in that room while we paint, but it keeps getting ever closer and I keep getting more excited.