Things you find in the walls.

There's no good way to explain how Saturday morning went without pictures.
I'm well into working on the back (and last!) bedroom upstairs. I was confronted with this weird built-in bookshelf/basin? Thing. And I didn't really want it to be there any more. The doorway was narrow, and I felt like it just didn't belong.
On with my trusty dust mask, and ready the tools of demolition!

It's just... not pretty. And full of nooks and crannies if I wanted to repaint it.
What a potential pain in the butt.

See? It jut doesn't look right. All those panels when the rest of the room is dry-walled.

Mystery though - Why does the lid lift off?

Why are there holes? And Slots?

It was put in *over* the door trim, so it must be a later addition.

And the trim has been scabbed in (badly.)

Enough. Time for it to come out.

Removed the scabbed in piece of baseboard trim - what have we here?
More trim disappearing back into the darkness? And more trim after a gap?

What on earth is going on here?

After carefully having removed the shelves, the baseboard trim, one horizontal plank and two vertical plank, I'm getting a better picture... of the chimney.

But let's talk about the metal clad box for a moment!
Ever so carefully nestled in the fake wall.

It's only metal on 3 sides! THe back isn't metal at all!

Also, freestanding on it's jenky little base. The metal box wasn't attached to the base.
And the base wasn't attached to the floor. The only thing holding this all in there was the sheathing.
And a lot of caulk.

Ohh! Holes!
For what, I have no idea.

One of them even lined up with the "drain" hole in the box.

Oh! A secret space behind the chimney!
There were no secret treasures in the space behind the chimney. Not even a news paper.
Just a rusty paper clip.

This... Thing... was put together with a variety of left over materials, in such a way that
I wondered it this was some kid's woodshop project.

Revealed! Look! A Chimney that once was finished!

The only little clue left behind was this tiny scrap of mangled copper that had come to rest in one of the floor holes.

Chimney finish - it had a coat of at least bleu and then light green pain on it before it was boxed in.

This floor probably hadn't seen sunlight in a very, very long time.

Cleaned up holes. Evidence of moisture with the finish shot, and fittings wearing around the edges of the holes.

The bottom of the almost-metal clad box - pencil measurements? Not sure what for.

This was another case of getting kind of excited for treasure and coming up empty. But the room looks more open already. I'm trying to decide what to do with the chimney - take it down, leave it? (Taking it down would be expensive, but give about 4 more square feet to a small room.) If I leave it, do I re-plaster it, or expose the brick?
So many decisions.

While thinking about that, I scrubbed, taped, and started spackling the rest of the room.

The whole room needs to be skimmed. This was just the first pass.

This room is coming along pretty quickly though. I'm getting better at this (or I've given up trying to be a perfectionist about it.) There's a lot of fiberglass tape and there's going to be a ton of drywall compound in this room to fix where the insulation guys blew out some walls. I wandered around with my screwgun and a box of 3" drywall screws and shored up anything that looked saggy.

One other neat detail of this room is that the top moulding where the walls meat the ceiling is picture rail moulding. At some point, someone didn't like the look of it and stuffed the gap full of rope caulk and painted over it. I have been carefully scraping it back out.

Profile of the picture rail moulding.
It's all muddied up here because of the paint, but it's actually quite a graceful moulding.

A rail hook. There's 2 or 3 of them kicking around the house.

The hook would go over the top round bit, and the weight of the picture
pulling down on the hook would keep everything in place.

The little pressed hooks have pretty little details too, under the paint.
It will be nice to get these cleaned up and be able to use them again.

So there you have it. I did some yardwork too - cut down the Rose of Sharon in the front yard and plotted out where I'm going to put the blueberry bushes. Picked up branches and kind of tidied up.
My goal is to get the back bedroom to a place closer to done by the weekend.