Living Room Rebuild, Part 1

Five days after we moved in to our new house, Justin & I started to get the itch to demo. So on our first Friday in the house, we tore the living room ceiling down. We were so eager to get started we didn't even take any before pictures. The only photos we have of this room pre-rothenbergers are the tiny listing photos from the realtor.

Please excuse the fuzziness - I tried to enlarge them so you can see how truly terrible the ceilings were. These pictures don't do justice to the large water stains and cracked popcorn ceiling. Just imagine that if our ceiling was a celebrity it would be Charlie Sheen . . . yeah it was that big of a mess.

So after several hours of chopping away at the ceiling, we were left with a ginormous pile of plaster on the floor. Since we hadn't thought through this project, I started calling trash removal companies around 8pm on Friday night. The prices I was getting quoted for waste removal were around $400 - so after Justin kindly picked my jaw up off the ground we moved on to Plan B. Find someone with a truck (this is key) to haul the construction waste for us. And, drumroll please, here is where our dear friends Jeff & Jewel ran to our rescue!

These two are troopers -  they drove 2 hours to our house and hauled our ceiling away for us! Jeff & Jewel - if you're reading this, we owe you. Consider yourselves 2 Snickers bars the richer :) 

Then we were left with this . . .

PS: See that white wire trailing away from Justin's hands? More on that tomorrow . . .