When we came to Berea, our home was the parish Rectory. It was advertised as having five bedrooms, but three of them were very small, set across the back of the house in what the architect's plans called a "dormitory" (see drawing, right). The boys used these as bedroom/play areas (Andrew on the left; Paul on the right; the center room as a common play area. It was cramped and not very comfortable, but it did have desks next to the closets and I put in shelves above the desks.

The beds were eventually put along the top wall in the drawing (the south wall of the house in real life), and the desks were no longer accessible; the space beneath them became known as "The Black Hole of Calcutta," a reference I doubt the boys "get" even to this day!

Once the boys were out on their own, we began thinking about what might be done to put these spaces to better use. The obvious solution was to turn the three tiny bedrooms into two decent-size ones, which Penney and I could use as studies/hobby rooms. This would free up the room we currently use (jointly) for those purposes, which could then revert to being a guest bedroom.

The first rule in any remodeling project is "destruction before construction." So, for the first and last time, I asked the boys to trash their rooms!

Paul was off on a mission trip to Harlan, Kentucky, rehabbing homes with a group from his church, but Andrew was happy to come and help lend a hand. It's a true joy to work with him: his attitudes are the same as mine: "Do it right." Between a reciprocating saw and a sledge hammer, we made fairly short work of the existing closets, which was really the only tear-down we needed to do. Various stages are shown below.

By chance, a house in the neighborhood is being "flipped" by a couple who also live in the neighborhood. They are doing a really magnificent job, and happened to have a Dumpster in the drive of the house being rehabbed. They didn't need all of it, and the extra room was more than enough for all of our debris so we bought a third of their Dumpster for our stuff. Talk about "win/win!" We carried the stuff out to my pickup, then trucked it across the street and down a house or two, backed it up to their Dumpster and tossed away! It took three loads.

The "fun" part of projects like this is supposed to be the construction phase, but it took quite a while for us to figure out how to read blueprints (the difference between "rough" measurements and "finished" ones had us buffaloed for a while, but it's really common sense once you "get it"). We bought a Ramset tool for firing nails into the cement slab underneath the tile, and Andrew was able to borrow a framing nail gun from his father-in-law. Once we got the nails a local do-it-yourself store sold us (they were the wrong ones!) un-jammed from the nail gun (that took about an hour-and-a-half!), the job went pretty quickly.

You can see the results on the right. We finished just before midnight, after which Andrew had to go back home, return the nail gun rig, pack for a trip to Chicago the next day (he's finishing up his Master's degree program)and grab a few hours of sleep.

I felt bad about keeping him to late, but his help was, literally, invaluable. I couldn't have done it without him. Paul will probably be on hand to help with the drywalling!

The drywall started going up on the walls pretty much as soon as we all got home from Andrew's Commencement ceremony and he'd had a chance to get his bags unpacked. It took about a day to get it all up, get the doorway into Bob's study framed and get the first coat of "mud" applied to joints and screw holes.

Shown to the left are Paul and Bob measuring for the door; to the right is Andrew cutting drywall (a task at which he proved expert).

We actually beat September 1 in one way; the primer coat cut-in painting was done before Labor Day. The main portion of the primer coat went on the ceiling and walls on Tuesday, the 2nd. It showed up a few "holidays" in the drywall work on the ceiling and one wall, which will have to be fixed and re-primed before the finish coats go on, but at least the two studies (Penney's to the left; Bob's to the right) now look like actual "rooms". A Wagner "Paint Crew" machine I bought made the painting (especially the ceiling) a lot easier, but cleaning it was a 45-minute job!

The laminate has an underlayment with vapor barrier, and the boys became experts at cutting and fitting it. (Andrew above; Paul to the far right.)

Yes, that's a rolling pin in Penney's hands, and, no, she doesn't think Bob's newly-laid tile is pie crust—she's tamping it down. Because the other rooms were tiled, we had to tile the hallway too before laying the laminate flooring so that the heights would match.