Renew - Revitalize - Redecorate!

I've been bugging my mom for years now to let me update her house and she has been against it from the beginning. Since I am now in full possession of said property, I've finally worn her down to the place where she said "Do whatever you want...it's your house now". With the green light, I set about making plans and decided to renovate just one room at a time, as I didn't want to completely freak her out with upsetting the entire house, plus it wouldn't overwhelm me quite so much. Since I'm an amateur it can be a daunting task ripping down and replacing parts of a 100 year old house! So far mom has been pretty okay with it, even to the point of helping me to move furniture and doing small tasks that make my life easier.

The first thing I had to do was remove the drop ceiling and did so with no problems what so over...a really amazing outcome, considering I always do everything the hard way. Unfortunately, the ceiling itself is about to fall in! Apparently the leaks in the roof we had in the past continued without our knowledge. A drop ceiling hides a multitude of sins. What a huge mess. I had to call my contractor Joe and have him come and give me a price. As I write this he's ripping down the old horse-hair plaster ceiling. He'll then check to make sure no further leaks will be happening in the future. He'll also rewire for a ceiling fixture with was non-existent in my lifetime. (There is a light switch on the wall that's never turned anything on).

After the removal of the drop ceiling, it was time to get rid of the dark mahogany paneling. I needed help with that so my brother Dave came by on Sunday to help me rip it down. That too, came down without a hitch...along with lots of the wall! I wasn't surprised and knew I was going to have to do some patching. The next day I got a 20 lb. bag of joint compound and started mixing and patching the huge chunks of wall that fell out. These holes were deep and went right through to the lath and really needed to be mended before the new walls went up. This was a bit tedious because the more I touched the walls, the more they crumbled and in the end I asked the contractor to patch and skim-coat the plaster so now I'll just have to deal with the final finishing.

A little side note: There was lovely surprise underneath this all this old dark paneling...lots of graffiti from when we were kids! We've date this between 1968-1970.