Down goes the wall

When we first moved in, our living room/dining room was something to be desired. It had old carpet, was really closed off, and just was in rough shape.

I won’t get into the red curtains, but you can imagine how quickly I wanted them gone. Anyway, this drab room really needed a makeover, and one of things that we had discussed is removing the wall (you can barely see) on the left. We wanted to open up the space, and here’s why. Here is the view from the other side of the wall.

The hallway, to both of us, seemed a bit closed off, and just felt blah to us. So, with a contractor (friend of the family) in hand, we walked through our options. He explored the wall, and much like we thought, we wouldn’t be able to take the whole thing down due to two load bearing beams. Bummer, but we did decide that we could cut this wall in half, and leave posts where the beams were, still opening up the wall, and giving us separation of the rooms and the hallway. It was a plan we were comfortable with, and one we knew could really make this first floor look a bit more alive. So, the contractor came back, ready to knock down some walls.They ripped down the drywall, and exposed all of the beams.

In the background there are about half a dozen black contractor trash bags, full of drywall and wood. In order to save us a trip to the dump, and being that it was trash day, our contractor made a deal with the trash guys to take the bags away for us. Saved me a huge trip to the dump. Next they cut down all the beams that weren’t load bearing in order to really open up the wall.

With the beams down, they laid out wood along the drywall so that we could lay a shelf to go across. This shelf we will stain to match the hardwood floors we’re having installed.

Oh, and remember that carpet in our living room? Well, we ripped it up ourselves and took it to the dump. I have to say that through this whole house renovation, I am beyond happy that I drive a honda element. I took bets on how many trips to the dump it would take me to get rid of all the carpet, and tack strips. My wife said 3, I told her it would be less. Guess who was right? I did it in 1.

Now that all that is gone, the walls down, we had to drywall the ceiling back together so there wasn’t a huge gap, and drywall the posts so it looked seamless.

With the walls all set to go, the new floors are installed, and the shelf is stained to match, all we had to do was decide on a paint color and we were set. By the way, do you know how many shades of beige there are? Answer, a lot. After picking up a ton of samples (as we like to do), we decided on a color that MC’s parents actually recently used in their house. What can we say, we’re copy cats. So, curious to see what it all looks like? Well, I’ll warn you, I took a picture when we were letting the kitchen cabinets dry in the room, so sorry for the random white doors, but here you go!

The chandelier will be changed out soon enough, we already bought a new one, but I figure that is a later update. So what do you think, slightly different, huh? I’d say so!