Scary Cabin

We’re in the home stretch as far as the interior remodel goes. We started work on the last room. The “utility” room was an addition added sometime in the 80’s, we think. It has the washer/dryer hook-ups and a fairly large closet. We’ve been using the room as a storage room. Well that changes starting now!

We moved everything out of the room and into the bedroom and moved the beds from bedroom to the recently finished upstairs. Once the room was emptied out, it was time to get started. Here’s the room once we emptied it out.

We started by removing all the paneling and closet doors. The room seemed to brighten up a bit with all the dark paneling gone. Then it was time to punch some holes in the walls and start ripping out drywall. Things start getting messy with all the dust. We did find one decent size wasp nest in the wall. As we opened up the walls, the smell of mouse/rat piss got quite a bit stronger. When we were working on the common wall between the bedroom and the utility room we did find some mouse carcases. So the smell was not totally unexpected. Taking the ceiling down was a real treat. Much of the insulation had turned to dust so as sections of the drywall came down, so did piles of insulation dust. There were also quite a number of small wasp nests in the ceiling.

Then we found the carpenter ant nest. Again, not unexpected. There were ants in the bathroom when we opened that up. There were some ants up above the bathroom wall and below the window (likely had been a leak there) and we had opened a small bit of the utility room ceiling a while back because of ants. It looks like the flashing on the addition roof was leaking for a while and the ants had moved in. One ceiling joist looked pretty chewed up. We started by spraying it down with carpenter ant killer and the ants started dropping like flies. Well they dropped from the ceiling to the floor to the point where the floor looked alive. Our missing became, kill the ants.

Over the course of the next 24 hours, we’d poke at the nest, rile up the ants and spray them, then step on the ones that drop.

After a few rounds of this, the number that drop each time has dwindled. The big question is what happened to the queen? Working around the ants, we managed to get all the insulation out of the ceiling and walls. With the room mostly cleaned out, we hauled it all off to the dump (ants included). The last thing to be removed was the floor covering. With that gone, we now have a clean slate.

Todo list
Utility Room

1. Replace ant infested ceiling joist
2. Get roof fixed/replaced
3. Replace electrical boxes
4. Add recessed lighting
5. Figure out washing machine drain
6. Replace dryer vent
7. Frame new closet
8. Seal up the room
9. New insulation
10. New drywall
11. Texture drywall
12. Paint walls and ceiling
13. Prep for tile floor
14. Tile floor
15. Grout floor
16. Window and door trim
17. Base boards
18. Install new ceiling fan