If you have been with us for a while then you are aware of the fact that our daughter purchased an older home here in New Jersey. That home is a 60 year old, mid century place that has some really good bones, but like most 60 year olds, yours truly included, its age is showing. This is one of many articles on how we are going about updating the house.
Over the past year or so we have worked on the enclosed porch, replacing some dated, leaky doors and windows. With the help of a fellow woodworker/plumber we added a new bathroom to the basement of the house. This year we want to tackle updating the rest of the basement.
One of the selling points of the home was what the realtor called a recreation room. A rather old term, but none the less an apt description. This room is huge, it measures 24 feet by 30 feet. It came with the ubiquitous dark paneling that was so in vogue in the 1950′s. Also included in this “Rec” room, was another staple of the 50′s, a built in bar. The floor was covered with an unidentifiable colored carpet. Best bet was that at some point it was yellow. Now it was a color someplace between dirty yellow and brown. Despite the paneling and questionable colored carpeting, this room was a gem. It has so much potential. The question however, was what would be the best use of the space. The pictures below are of the room as it was when my daughter and her kids moved in. As the lighting was terrible, the pictures are dark but you get the idea. The pictures pan from left to right around the room.
Doing what many professional designers suggest, we did nothing with this room for the first year that she was in the house. This allowed for everyone to come to grips with exactly how the room was really used, not what everyone thought it would be used for. It’s real easy to sit there and pontificate on how you think a space will be used, it’s entirely another thing to actually know how it’s used. To understand how best to use the room we looked at several areas of the room.
We needed to determine if there was enough lighting in the room. This one was a no brainer, NO there wasn’t enough lighting. Being a child of the 50′s, yes I’m really that old, I don’t recall the world being dark and dreary, but based on the lighting in this house and many others of the era, it must of been. In this entire room, all 720 square feet of it, was light from a total of 4 single bulb ceiling fixtures, and two single bulb wall sconces. Considering how humid it gets down in the basement in the summers, I’m surprised that there were not mushrooms growing down there.
The same types of lighting were present or maybe a better word would be missing, throughout the house. Each of the bedrooms had an “updated” ceiling fixtures. These ” builder grade” fixtures were installed in the house as part of the ”let’s sell the house upgrades”. It didn’t take much imagination to see those 12″ square ceiling fixtures that many homes of this era had. The upgraded fixtures were better looking than their predecessors, but really didn’t provide much more illumination. During the move in stage, these were all removed and replaced with ceiling fans that included lighting packages.
The initial game plan for the recreation room, also known as the family room, involved removing the bar and the wall behind it. We weren’t 100% sure what we wanted to do with the rest of the room, but the past year had proven that the “bar” was not needed, nor was it used. In fact most of the time, the bar did nothing more that act as holding area for things that couldn’t find their way back where they belonged. Funny how that happens when you have kids in a house.
We are sure that if this old bar could talk, it would have plenty of tales of good times and family fun it witnessed. But now it was large unused piece of architecture, and it had to go. As we started to disassemble the bar, we soon found a couple of surprises. We knew that there was electrical power in the wall behind the bar, and I had made plans to disconnect it before we took the wall down, but we hadn’t counted on their being power inside the bar itself.
The work of tearing out the old bar was halted temporarily while I traced the electrical wiring down and then safely removed it. Most of the wiring went back into junction boxes that were located inside the adjacent utility room. While in most jurisdictions the use of electrical junction boxes is allowed, I prefer not use them. The person or persons who did the initial wiring in this basement apparently felt otherwise, or the cost of junction boxes were a LOT less than the cost of wire back when this was installed. When I traced one of the circuit from behind the bar back into the utility room, I ran into a junction box, no problem, except that this junction box was connected to another junction box located 12″ away. One junction box made sense, but the second one, who knows. I removed the wiring all the way back the second junction box, the first box and all of its associated wiring were removed and put aside for recycling.
The national wiring code Stipulates the number of wires that are allowed in any electrical box. For detailed information on the this subject, please go to our electrical reference page. Local jurisdictions may amend the national code, by adding further requirements, so it is advised that you contact your local electrical inspector or codes enforcement bureau if you have questions.
The national code allows a total of 10, 14 gauge conductors in the size electrical boxes that I removed. Each of these boxes held a maximum of 6 conductors, so I have no idea why there were so many. Unless the electrical got a good price on the boxes.
To dissemble the bar itself, I used a special tool, Kid power. I never realized how much fun two young boys could have with a sledge hammer. After equipping them with gloves and safety glasses, I turned them loose on knocking the bar apart. 20 minutes and a lot of laughter later the bar, was a pile of broken lumber on the floor of the basement. As part of the deal to allowing them to tear the bar apart, they helped carry the debris out to my trailer.
The wall behind the bar, was removed using the same tools. Ok, I did use a couple of pry bars, and a reciprocating saw, but most of the wall was knocked down with the sledge hammer and some well placed karate kicks. The boys had so much fun with the bar and wall, that they were disappointed when I stopped them from tearing anything else out.
So now with the bar and supporting wall removed and the area cleaned up, it was time to set back and really decide how best to use this large open space. After a lot of discussion, some serious, some ridiculous like an indoor pool, we came up with a master plan on to use this space. More on that later.
