Shake for me girl, I want to be your back-door man!

When we bought the house, this was the view of the back. The small out-jutting part was a "storage closet", sort of. Once upon a time long before, it was a back door! A beautiful alternate opening to the house thoughtfully and intentionally placed right where it should be, right in the middle. It was a 2 way wonder portal that would allow one to park their car in the conveniently located driveway and welcome them into a wonderful hallway that gently spilled them and all of the stuff they lug back and forth into the funky kitchen. We imagined what it was like to go in and out of that door, whether we were in a hurry or wanted to take our time, we knew we had to have that door. We wanted, no, NEEDED that extra opening.
The hallway on the other side of this closet holds our laundry area as well. With the closet there, it was an unpleasant cave in the back of the house. The only reason to be in that hall was to get to the bathroom, the laundry crap or to get to the closet. We decided we'd had enough of and that opening this up would give us a lot more options for future demos, since we could park a dumpster right in the driveway and then chuck all our debris out the back door.

Here's the good stuff!!!
We didn't get many in-progress pictures because we were both busy tearing crap down. But most of the way through the process, Tina came to the rescue! Before this point, we had completely emptied the crap out of the closet, torn down the insulation the former owner nailed to the inside of the closet walls, disconnected the electricity to the three different electrical outlets that were connected to the 2x4s, pulled down a huge amount of lattice and a few sheets of plywood.
Dave was there, chucking stuff into a bucket. I was disconnecting the wiring to one of the three inside-rated electrical outlets that had been installed, while co-workers Ben and Andrew were verifying it was OK to remove the 2x4s that may or may not have been holding the roof up. You can also see the remains of the rock and concrete planter that was built up over the last step. We smashed that out with a 10lb sledge.

Once we had the door open and all the extra wood and junk cleared away, I just kept going in and out, repeating "Holy crap! We have a back door!" I was very pleased.

Tina made me stop running in and out and up and down the stairs like a maniac so she could install the new door handle and electronic keypad deadbolt. Before I let her proceed with the installation I made her stand in front of our newly-recovered door to show off all of our hard work.

Once I got out of her way and she started with the door handle, she was happy again.

We all stood back and admired our results, occasionally repeating "holycrap-backdoor" under our breaths.



Bonus pictures:


While everyone else was working, the dogs were running around the yard like the crazy mutts they are. They stopped a few times to square off.


On the other side of the house, we're still working on getting the yard into some semblance of manageable. We should probably use a front-end loader or something, but we also have shovels so Tina has decided to displace a mountain. Here's her start.You can't tell from this picture, but that hill is enormous.

The next projects will probably include purchasing and installing a storm door for the back door. We're currently leaning toward a Larson storm door with a screen that slides right up into the door and hides so you can have screen or glass and don't have to mess with popping screens out. Pretty slick. http://www.larsondoors.com/script/browse_2.asp?Product=Lifestyle

We're also going to paint that back door closer to the color of the rest of the outside doors on the house.

Labels: back door, demolition

posted by Mike @ Sunday, July 06, 2008