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Butterfly RoomThe Beginning The butterfly room was one of the two first-floor bedrooms in the house when I bought it. It earned its name from the swarm of colorful stick-on butterflies that adorned the sky blue walls. It was obviously a little girl's bedroom before I came along. As a room, it had almost no function. It was so small it could maybe house a queen sized bed, with nothing else able to fit in the room. In the first few years I owned the house, it became an occasional storage room, an occasional guest room, and a once in a while party overflow room.
The Destruction Process After toying briefly with the idea of opening the room to the dining room side, and fashioning it as a Japanese-style tea room, I eventually decided it would get more and better use as an extension of the front living room. The scope of work would be bigger and badder, but it would be worth it.
Cleanup and Framing Cleanup was an intense process. The wall which was now removed had been plaster. It left behind a dust storm and as well as debris which we needed to removed with a shovel. Framing was a little tricky. It turned out that part of the ceiling (over the closet and dining room) was a different height that the ceiling in the butterfly room. The wall which separated the dining room was also not built properly and needed some beefing-up.
The Outside Wall If the framing was tricky, the outside wall was a nightmare. The gap left between the butterfly room wall (light blue), and what was previously part of the dining room wall (green), had two different depths of plaster on each side of it. The gap was less than a foot across, so patching it would have resulted in a noticeable bevel in the wall. Since the house is old and the insulation was poor, the decision was made to rip out the entire outside wall, re-insulate it and drywall it. It was one point in the project where things started to move backward instead of forward. During the destruction of the wall, we found a copy of the Chicago Herald Examiner, dated May 4th, 1919.
Tape and Mud Taping and mudding started with me, and finished with me paying someone to do the rest of it. The overall project was coming up on 2 years, and my time was being divided between it and other large house projects, primarily the pergola. Once this phase was finished, I got back to working on it myself. I usually enjoy painting and flooring, which was the next step.
Paint and Floor Once I painted the inside walls, and repainted the outside living room and dining room walls, Mike came over to help with the flooring. We laid down the same pergo which we had installed in the dining room years earlier. In the days following I installed the trim. I saved a single butterfly, which I chiseled out of the original plaster, and framed it as on homage to the original room. As of now, the only thing remaining is to furnish the room. I'll post those updates here once they become a reality.
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