Backs Against the Wall

Holiday season is over and that means it's remodeling time at the Hart Mansion.

For today's project, we decided to punch holes in Kathy's 3rd-floor office walls. Now that the adjoining bathroom is (more or less) finished, we wanted to take the "leftover" space between the two rooms and make it into a closet for Kathy. This room has no closet, so adding one seemed like a good use of the space.

Step One was removing the drywall. But of course, it's never that easy.

Once we broke into the drywall we noticed some interesting painted fabric behind it. The fabric is a very fine mesh, almost like silk, and it's covered with a thin paper-like substance that's been painted white. You can see a bit of it here.

The fabric-and-paper material covers the entire wall, and is nailed to wooden boards behind it. Those boards, as it turns out, are 3/4-inch tongue-and-groove redwood. So the entire wall is made of redwood with an early form of wallpaper nailed over it. Interesting.

Our plan was to ease out the boards and save them for some future project, probably paneling the inside of the new closet. They're harder to remove than I expected, though, because they're nailed to the sill plate at the bottom and nailed to a header at the top -- above ceiling level. The best solution was to sacrifice one board (the smallest one) to create an opening, then pull out or saw off the nails top and bottom, and then ease each board sideways into the gap. One by one, we managed to remove the boards without damaging them too much.

While I was up there sawing through nails with a hacksaw blade, I noticed that this redwood paneling runs everywhere. It's also in the ceiling of the room, and in all the other walls that I can see. As far as we can tell, the entire room (possibly even including the floor at some point) was covered in tongue-and-groove redwood boards. Nice.

Oh, and I found some of these old nails, too. This one was holding some old shims to the framing. It's square, like a tiny railroad spike. But interestingly, all the boards I removed had more modern nails. Not sure if that means the redwood paneling was added at a later time, or if they'd been removed and reattached at some point. At any rate, I'm leaving the old nails, and the old framing, in place.