22 March 2016. We did an interesting job recently. We were asked by a home owner at Enmore to remove a very old built in wardrobe from the upstairs bedroom of an old terraced home. Like a lot of homes in the inner west, this place was well over 100 years old and had been through many iterations of renovation – some good and some not so good. The wardrobe we were asked to remove would have to fall into the ‘not so good’ category! It had been built into the corner of a very small bedroom and the top of the wardrobe touched the ceiling so any original cornice work had been removed in the original installation of the wardrobe.

The wardrobe was very well secured to not only the walls but also the flooring, which was a nice old kauri pine which meant extra care was required to not damage the flooring in the removal process. The approach we took with this handyman job was to actually dismantle the wardrobe piece by piece because of the tight fit in the bedroom. We started by removing the 2 doors which were hard to remove as the screws in the hinges were badly rusted so it was a challenged to get them out. Next we removed the sides of the wardrobe with a hammer and crowbar being very careful not to damage the adjacent walls. The top then came away relatively easily. The biggest challenge by far was removing the base of the wardrobe which had been screwed and nailed to the floor in approximately 30 places!! This was a big job to remove these fasteners without causing damage to the floorboards. It was a matter of carefully approaching one fastener at a time but eventually we had the satisfaction of removing the base. There was a huge amount of dust, chips of old wood and bits of plaster that needed a thorough sweeping and then vacuuming up.

This job, which superficially looked straightforward took a good 2.5 hours to complete but the owner was very happy with the newly created space and that no damage had been caused in the removal process!