A little bit of urban renewal
When we moved into our house back in the 20th century, it had a few, um, features that we decided that we'd need to get rid of pretty soon. Some of those features, like the ugly green and brown carpet on the second floor, were removed almost immediately (in the case of the carpet, we started ripping that carpeting up 15 minutes after we were handed the keys to the house, and we refinished the floors "only" two years after that; the ugly deck was whittled down to nothingness over the course of 6-7 years).
One of the really sad misfeatures of the house was the Stupid Room, which would have been a perfectly nice porch except that some previous owner had cut the room in half to extend one of the bedrooms, then panelled the remaining porch with hideous board-and-batten plywood, painted parts of it in a unnatural shade of green, then stuffed a little sink into it. This was too much to consider fixing, so we just kept the door closed and tried to pretend that it didn't exist for about 7 years.
Last year, I got curious about the bathroom, because it had a mirror in a windowframe, which may have been good for reflections, but didn't help for natural light. So I went into the stupid room and pried up one of the pieces of plywood to see what was under it. It turned out that the window was still under it -- painted over, but still intact -- so, over the course of the next few weeks we pried out the mirror, scraped the paint off the window, and ended up with less mirrors but more light in the bathroom and a large chunk of the wall in the stupid room with the plywood stripped off (I used most of this plywood for projects, so it didn't even go to waste.)
Today, it was somewhat rainy, so we decided that this would be as good a day as any to see what was under the rest of the plywood:
There are still some mysteries about the stupid room (did it originally have the windows so it could be a sleeping porch? Do the top sashes drop so that there can be airflow? Is the horrible green ceiling original, or did they add it when they "improved" the room?, but having the shingles visible on the walls make the porch look much more like a room that we'd be caught alive in than it used to look like.
We still have to rip the (hideous) vinyl flooring out (this is vinyl flooring with a suspicious insulating layer under it. It will be buckets of fun to rip out without putting a cloud of suspicious fibers all over the neighborhood; we'll probably have someone working in there while someone else is wielding a gardenhose to keep the particles down on the floor so we can mop them up, drop them into a biohazard bucket, then rush them off to Pakistan to use in the war against terror™. And, while we're at it, we need to rip out the stupid sink at the end of the room, and (if I can convince the best that it's more important to have a proper porch than it is to have a little wart off the side of one of the bedrooms) rip out the partition that sink was attached to and rebuild the wall separating the southwest room from the porch,
Notice that there's very little plumbing work that needs to be done here. I need to shut off the water, then cut and cap the pipes that run up to that bedroom (which will be fun because I'm not exactly sure where they tie in, and the last time I was working in the crawlspace under the back porch area I came down deathly ill halfway through the work), but there's nothing nasty like trying to replumb the bathroom involved. Carpentry is easy, because you can always nail boards over your mistakes. Plumbing, on the other hand, is hard because you have to worry about torrents of water destroying half of your house, so I suspect that the stupid room will remain a higher priority than the bathroom until the next catastrophic leak occurs.
One interesting little feature of ripping the board and batton siding out of the stupid room is that it uncovered a place where a previous owner had ripped out the shingles on the wall, cut through the wall itself (1x6 planking, covered with tarpaper, just like Charles Ingalls did to the family claim shanty in DeSmet, South Dakota. I suspect it's not code anymore, but if you're talking code most of this house wouldn't qualify), and put in a plank door covering, um, I'm not sure what; the compartment is now filled with blown in insulation, and we've not yet pulled it out to see if anything interesting was put into this little cubbyhole.) We don't intend to actually keep this meaningless little cubby, but it will be a nice place to put a wiring cabinet when I fish some electrical wires up from the basement to put actual electrical outlets into that part of the second floor.