Another Home Project

A few weeks ago Alyson and I decided to finally bite the bullet and work on removing a pretty old and dated vanity that was split between our bedroom and bathroom. It served no purpose with exception of storage and was looking quite dated in the design department. Unfortunately we both forgot to take a photo prior to work so we had to pull an old Zillow listing for the above photo.

Between myself being an engineer and her a paralegal we were weak in the department of knowing how to remove something attached to the wall, so we started small. Knowing we were going to be painting after some vanity work - we started with taping up the room to protect the trim, but we got antsy and started taking all the drawers out of the vanity.

Once the drawers were out we could tell there were screws holding the vanity to the side wall, back wall and holding the top piece on. It was the first time I've seen a screw hole that resembled a perfect square which none of my available screwdrivers worked with.

Thankfully my drill had a collection of drill bits and alongside those drill bits were some odd screw shapes which one fit perfectly. We were moving at that point unscrewing everything about this vanity until we could pull the heavy top right off.

At this point things started to seem a bit odd as a ton of debris in the form of dusty mud like substance was falling as we unscrewed stuff from the back wall. At this point I have to remind the reader that my microwave was broken because wasps made a nest in the goose-neck vent on the roof which at some point collapsed taking their nest all the way down the vent.

Of course a bunch of mud and wasps sitting in the exhaust of your microwave is never a good thing. The mud and wasps sunk closer to the internals of the microwave after falling through the grate on the exhaust vent which ultimately broke the machine. In this journey to replacing I ended up doing a bunch of clean up on the wall to replace the microwave which led to temporarily turning off the power.

Perhaps I was blind to it on previous visits to my electrical panel, but this time I noticed the brand "Terminix" and saw "sub termite" written down on some log. I was dealing with wasps, but to read this home was being treated for termite damage 20~ years ago was not something I was aware of.

Perhaps that is not something you have to disclose when selling a home and not anything my inspection found, but it was a bit maddening to find after purchasing the home. Thankfully though I imagine if active termites were untreated for 20+ years the house would probably be in terrible shape.

As we pulled the vanity off the wall the wood adhered to the wall was majorly damaged - crumbling as it was pulled off.

My gut said this was termite damage because the wood was severely weakened, so we continued on ripping this vanity out until just the walls remained. At this point I had gardening gloves on so I felt much better just carrying dismantled pieces around to clear the working area.

With the vanity gone we were now looking at some disgusting drywall coated in a wood/mud/termite substance. I wasn't 100% sure though so I tossed this image into a session with Google's Gemini AI agent to see what it had to say.

Gemini confirmed it was termite damage so it was time to get to work to clean this up. We took vanity pieces outside and broke them down into little chunks of wood to dispose of in regular weekly trash pick up. I hope my trash is actually picked up this Monday, because our trash can was very heavy with a dismantled vanity inside it.

Around that same time I suited up in a mask and glasses and go to work scraping & sanding this drywall. The gallery below should show the progression from scraping to sanding and it turned out pretty well from what it started at. With one layer of drywall paste it might appear like no damage was done.

It was sad to see the vanity was built against the concrete slap which means I have to re-tile a section to re-use this space, but I started wondering - is my job done here?

Knowing a colony of termites wrecked havoc on my vanity and drywall I have to assume the wood behind that drywall is in poor shape. Do I take my chance now with a wall that needs patching anyway and cut a hole and investigate? Do I call another round of pest control to confirm the 25+ year old termites were actually eradicated? Do I patch up the wall and forget about it? Do I prepare to replace some studs with new wood?

This blog will go out before we've made a decision, but hopefully we pick the right one - we have a closet extension to build.