This post is about 3 months overdue. I always want to wait until everything is "done" to take after pictures, but I know myself, and I'm not a decorator, and my house will never look "done". This is real life people:) Only cleaner:):)
The wall dividing our front room from our kitchen dining areas has bothered me since day one. Seriously, this was almost a deal breaker for me and the fact that the wall made it so the front door entered into the kitchen/dining area drove me to the brink of insanity. The problem with simply removing the wall was the hallway. It has a dropped ceiling to accommodate duct work and it was kind of a dead space anyway. Simply removing the wall was not an option. We have literally spent 5 1/2 years brainstorming how to fix it. Move the kitchen? Expensive and not really helpful. Move the stairs? Hmmm. But that would mess up the basement. Etc. For FIVE AND A HALF YEARS! When we finally settled on the perfect solution of putting a hall closet in the current living room door and opening up the wall between the kitchen/dining and living room, we started within a month. AHHH! I don't know how I lived with it before, I am so in love!
Lots of pictures!
Living room before. The front door of the house is behind that wall.
Kitchen side of the wall before.
We panicked when we tore the drywall off and saw this X framed into the wall. I literally cried. We were certain that this wasn't load bearing, but this was definite cause for concern. We called our neighbor Dan the contractor and he told us it was most likely a shear wall, which would be no big deal if we added one somewhere else. So we put it in the back wall of the closet we added.
Here you see the new closed being framed in and the old wall is gone! Already so much better.
Recessed lights are in and the popcorn ceiling scraped and the drywall up and patched and partially re-textured.
This pretty much speaks for itself:)
Starting to put the flooring down. We ended up going with laminate, mostly because of the price. It's inexpensive, and really beautiful. Everywhere we went looking I said I wanted something interesting with a lot of grain, not too dark and without big gaps for stuff to get stuck in. And I was shocked at how little there was to choose from. Seriously, I don't want your beautiful dark shiny flooring with massive cracks for mac & cheese to get wedged in. No thanks! We finally found one and bonus! It was discontinued and heavily discounted. So lucky!
My new favorite view of the house!
So in all we ended up adding 11 recessed lights, all new plugs and switches, added a hall closet (this having a pantry now), new flooring, texture, and paint. We are so happy with how it all turned out and we seriously don't know how we lived with it the way it was before. It was by far the messiest thing I have ever experienced, but, like childbirth (haha), I hardly even remember that part, only the great new house we are enjoying now.
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