A laundry/sewing room located near the bedrooms is something any comfortable home should have. We had just the candidate: on the second floor, the rear-most room in the ell had been split into two narrow spaces. One half became a narrow closet spanning the width of the house, the other contained a tortured effort to create a staircase from the second floor of the outback to the attic, where there would have been a garret apartment.
Our first project was to remove all this, re-create the room that had been there and make it a second floor laundry /sewing room. Work began in April. The plan was to break through from the outback on the second floor so debris could be taken out that way, not through the house.
It wasn’t a lot of fun. First the outback had to be cleaned up enough that it wasn’t hazardous to work in. A couple of year’s worth of pigeon droppings coated the floors. I bought a respirator.
There was an impossibly cramped (and unfinished) winding stair leading to a landing at chest height, then a straight shot up to the attic. We started by breaking through the wall (on the right in this photo) so we could remove debris.
The winding stair was removed and the wall splitting the room was torn down
Now you can see into the room and see the remaining parts of the stair.
The last of the “stairs” was ready to be torn out