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November 22, 2005
Too close for comfort
Yesterday I spent most of the day carefully removing water-damaged plaster from the bottom 34 inches of the laundry room's walls. Once that was done, I tackled the (seemingly) much easier job of removing an equally water-damaged piece of drywall. Unfortunately, in so doing, I discovered that the breaker box was much closer to the drywall than I'd originally thought--it was attached to the 1/2" drywall and its backing 3/8" plywood with a couple of screws, and nothing more. What possessed the previous owner to do this? And with the breaker box, of all things?
This necessitated the removal of all of the remaining hardboard from the mudroom, which backs on to the laundry room. Then, the 3/4" plywood to which the hardboard was nailed had to be removed, all without damaging the prehung door that's sitting in the hallway, waiting for next weekend's installation.
It's a good thing that I was more than a bit frustrated when I attempted to remove the plywood, as I'm not certain that I would have otherwise been able to remove the 2 full sheets of it by myself. I've come to the conclusion that I can carefully remove the drywall, albeit in much smaller pieces than I'd like, then reinforce the existing plywood backing so that the breaker box has a solid foundation.
The offending piece of drywall
The uncovered breaker box
Posted by plainstext at November 22, 2005 06:06 PM
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