"Tear down that wall!"

No, no, not a political post.

When we moved to this house in 2000, hubby and I spent the next threeish years finishing the basement ourselves. It was a fun weekend project and, as there were no kiddos about, something we could do or not as whim struck.

Once the kids came along, we repurposed the workshop into a playroom and we use the office considerably less now that hubby and I have moved more primarily to laptops, but otherwise it remains mostly the same.

Well, the boys are getting older and their playroom antics need a bit more space (and it'd be nice to go ahead and install an Xbox and TV dedicated solely for them where we don't have to partake of it, should we not want to, etc. And so we're transitioning the playroom into a bit more of a hangout room. (There's still a good bit of Lego and car playing that happens, youngest is just 7, but he's also content to do whatever his older brother does, so we can shift younger kid toys to his room and then no one suffers. Because there is no way on this green earth that we're putting an xbox and TV anywhere near a bedroom.)

In kicking this idea around, hubby said, "Since we don't really use the office, what if we took out the wall between them and made it a larger space? We could downsize to one desk for us to share and the filing cabinet and then there's more room for kids to hangout."

And, in all, it's a good idea.

We're going to block off the hallway (with doors) and expand the utility area a little in the new configuration, but really it's not a lot of work to fiddle with the layout.

Well, hubby this afternoon got a wild hair and took one of youngest boy's magnets and was dragging it along the main wall we want to take down and, sure enough, it found a screw. Then another. So he got his handy power drill with screwdriver bit and...pulled out all the screws holding the drywall up on the office side of said wall.

A little xacto along the edges, and before I realized what we were doing, we had pulled all the drywall down (in nice, reusable sheets) from said wall, removed the insulation and are half-way through cutting apart the sheets of drywall on the playroom side.

All evening, my mind has been waffling between quoting President Reagan and thinking, "Well, that escalated quickly."