Adventures in Renovation

There's a hole in my wall! Woo hoo!

Why am I so excited? Well this story goes back a couple weekends. Saturday, July 2nd. My Dad comes up to help me work on some kitchen demolition. We talked a lot about what to do about this one wall.

Just about who comes to see my house says how great it would be if I could knock out the wall between the kitchen and the living room and open it up. It's one of the first things I wanted to do with the house too. Here's a sketch I made before I had closed on the house and was doing a lot of conceptualizing. Oh, I used to have such lofty ideas.

But since everything on this house has taken way way longer to do than I ever imagined, rebuilding that wall was just too much trouble. I was worried that once I started to take apart that wall, I would screw up enough stuff in the living room that I would be creating a bigger problem. Like pulling at a thread on your sweater.

So my idea then was to take off the 1/4" plywood that someone had laminated the wall with and wallpapered over, take down the screwed up plaster behind that, and replace it with some nice new drywall. Only on the kitchen side of the wall. Leave the living room side alone.My Dad thought I could save some time by just drywalling over the plywood that was there, but I just felt like that was contributing to the problem. The reason everything in this house is such a pain to begin with is because no one repaired anything. They just added another layer or veneer over top of it.

Amazingly enough, behind that 1/4" plywood is a giant window! It looks like is was originally built into the house that way. It's giant. Almost completely floor to ceiling. It's nuts. After we pulled down the plywood, there was another layer of wood over the window because at some point someone decided they wanted a knick knack shelf instead of a window and boarded up one side and built selves in the window. Then eventually both sides were covered up again and cabinets were hung over it.

I was so excited, I was freaking out. All I have to do now is open up this hole again and viola! Open floor plan. Now I'm going to build up the inside of the window a little to make a bar height counter on the living room side, and regular counter on the other side.