Demo Day: The Moore House

Jun 27

In March, Joseph, the kids, and I loaded up my car and drove 1,061 miles (one-way!) to get started on our house in Arizona—The Moore House.

My mom, my brother, and my oldest niece met us there. Joseph and Andrew first moved the antique stove out of the way for safe keeping. To answer your question, no, it’s not going back in the house—but maybe another project.

Demo - The Moore House - Saguaro West Interior Design — Expert appliance movers

Joseph and I then got to work taking out a ramp in the front yard installed by a previous tenant. So. Many. Screws. While we worked, the kids played. And when I say this, it absolutely gave me “all the feels” to see my kids playing on the same swing and running through the same house as I did. They love being there so much already.

Next up, we got started on the doors. We are fortunate to have nearly every original door, but I have a couple that I’ll need to source a replacement for. My grandparents remodeled in the 1960s, and those doors aren’t the same. The original doors have been painted over God only knows how many times, so we tested a few options. We did a paint stripper—which worked wonders, but it’s so easy to etch the doors as you’re scrapping. When I go back, I’m going to try a different type of stripper and see how it goes.

Ideally, I’d love to have the doors down to natural wood, but we may just have to sand them down for a smooth painting surface. I pulled off all the hardware and got to work restoring it.

Here’s the post on restoring the door hardware.

Here’s the post on painting the door hardware.

Next came the fun part. My husband Joseph is top-notch in many things, but he shines with demo. We removed all the original beadboard. There was only beadboard from the original structure—four rooms. In the 1960s, my grandparents added an additional living space and bedroom to the back of the house. Yes! The beadboard is going back in throughout the whole house with additional trim work.

As we got down to the studs, we noticed a few things. 1) The studs on our 100-year-old house looked brand-new. Hooray! For the perks of Arizona. 2) We knew my grandparents remodeled the home in the 1960s, but there was another remodel before then.

From an original photo, we knew my grandparents put in a big picture window during their 1960s renovations. But, what we didn’t know, was that sometime before that, windows were removed from the east and west side of the house. Inside the walls, we found an old inscription showing the house was remodeled in 1937.

The walls above the beadboard are our next question mark. There were layers and layers of wallpaper. While a few more recent layers came off easily, the original layers are almost permanently fused. So, we’re either going to take it all out and put in new sheetrock. Or, do a skim coat or maybe a Roman clay texture to give us a fresh surface.