Mudroom/Office Part 3 - The Feastmaster

The beloved 'Feastmaster'....

Let's have a little chat about this beast before we get started. We believe the area that we are calling the mudroom/office, must've been outside at some point before the garage was added. There is brick in this room and the beloved 'feastmaster' is (was) also in this room. That's the only thing that makes any sense, because it's a BBQ grill.

This is what greeted us each time we entered our home. Now this photo was from the first day we saw this property. But it gives you a really good picture of how much space this 'feastmaster' took. I wanted it gone from the very beginning.

So we knew this was going to be an insane job. We weren't even sure we could do it. We were concerned if in the process of taking out the 'feastmaster' if we would jeopardize the chimney above. We didn't want to make more problems by removing it.

We had someone come out and take a look. They reassured us about some of our concerns. We asked for an estimate to have them complete the job. Ummm... almost $3000.00 to remove it. Whoa! From talking with them and other masonry people, we decided to take it on. It was going to be a hard and messy job and we were praying the chimney was going to be okay. Lord, help us!

We first tried using a masonry drill bit to see if we could drill through the mortar and chip it out.

That wasn't very successful.... However, through that and some chipping we managed to get our first brick out.

Boy... we've got a L O N G way to go.... Thankfully, we have a friend at church that lent us his masonry tools and a jackhammer. Thanks so much, Dave!! We couldn't have done it with out the jackhammer! That's when we started making some progress.

Unfortunately, in late winter, hubby fell and injured his shoulder. He was having a hard time working the jackhammer for long periods of time. So, I thought I'd give it a go. It was incredibly hard work. It was super heavy, loud, and messy, but I did it!

We realized we needed to contain the mess a bit more. Brick dust was getting everywhere. So, we taped up plastic around the 'feastmaster' and kept going.

There was soooo much brick to get rid of. We actually saved all of the whole bricks. We may line gardens with it in the future. We took the rest to the dump. There was almost a 1/2 ton of debris to get rid of!

Now, it's mostly cleaned up.

Almost there... Clean out where the bricks will be inserted on the right and cut out some rebar at the base.

Cutting out rebar to make the floor level

Now we are ready to start bricking in the opening. This was all hubby. He did a fantastic job, even with a injured shoulder. (Btw... we were working on this back in March and April. It took a whole month to take that 'feastmaster' out. And hubby's shoulder is much much better now.)

The first row is the most important row. It must be level. It will affect every row above it.

We let that dry overnight before building upon it. Just to make sure we were solid. Each day hubby made more progress.

Making progress on filling brick opening.

Hubby isn't a brick layer, but he's done some here and there. I think he did a fantastic job! We weren't too worried, because in the end we planned on painting it.

The wall is complete and now to fill in the base, so it will be level for flooring.

It's done!! Whew! What a job!! We are soooo glad it's finished! Look at all that room!

Now it's time for paint! Brick needs to have a masonry primer on it first. We had this leftover from when we painted the chimney. (Yep, we painted the chimney, but I'll share more about that when I do a post on us painting the house)