With all the paneling removed the fun part really begins. See in addition to using nails the folks who installed the paneling also used construction adhesive. This kept the center of the paneling stuck to the wall. Unfortunately when the paneling is removed, msot of the adhesive stays stuck to the wall. Since I didn’t want to replace all of the drywall that meant that the adhesive needed to be sanded off. Before I did that I used a block plane to scrape off some of the adhesive, but I couldn’t get it all, and that meant that I spent many house using my random orbital sander, with a 50 grit pad to take down the rest of the adhesive. My wife was nice enough to help out and do some sections, but it still took forever.

Once the adhesive was all gone, the next part was to patch up the walls. Some spots got sanded down a bit to much, and in a lot of spots the adhesive actually pulled the paper off the Sheetrock. There were also some large holes in two places, that required a new piece of Sheetrock be patched in. All of this meant another few days using lots of joint compound, and sanding some more. Ohh and don’t you just love the green and pink walls?

Removing wood paneling seems quite simple at first.  You just take a pry bar and pop it off the walls.  The glue doesn’t hold very well and the nails are small and easily pull through the wood.  Unfortunately since this was the 2nd room I was doing (the first was Jess’s office), I knew that getting the paneling off is the easiest part.   Once its off, you have to scrape and sand the glue off of the wall, and then spackel up all the holes.  Disposal of the paneling is also a pain, since the 4×8 sheets don’t easily fit out the door,  and the garbage men won’t take them.   To do that I stacked the sheets up, took my trusty reciprocating saw, and cut them into pieces small enough to fit in a box that I could put out at the curb.  Wasn’t overly difficult but it made a huge mess and the wood splinters like crazy.

This isn’t really the best picture, but its the only one I had of the guest room before we ripped the carpeting out. When we moved in the guest room was walled with wood paneling and had a very dark grey carpet on the floor. The carpet was pretty beat and underneath there were some nice hardwood floors in decent shape. So right away we decided to rip up the carpet and chuck it. We then moved into the room and used it as our bedroom while we were redoing the master bathroom. Once that was finished and the room was vacated we tried to figure out what to do to the room. The problem is that its a very small room, and the wood paneling is very dark (as well as being quite dated). The room does have two windows but they aren’t very big, and therefore the room always feels like a cave. So clearly the paneling has to go. With the other big projects coming up we can’t afford to replace the windows right now, so they’ll have to stay. Also since we’ll be takign down the paneling we’ll need to replace all of the molding.

As an aside I actually started ripping down the paneling in December, but never got around to posting it.