The Opening

In my attempts to create my house tour, let me go back and tell you about some of the things we’ve already done to the house.

Less than 24 hours after we got the keys to our house, we began knocking out the wall between the kitchen and living room.

It started out like this, with a regular sized doorway between the two rooms.

(This picture was from the home inspection.)

To make the house feel more open, we decided to enlarge that opening to be 8’ wide.

Now it looks like this:

(These pictures are a tad bit old, but you get the idea.)

(See that hole in the floor? That’s where a cold air return used to be in the wall, and was therefore in our floor. I will post about fixing that later!)

It was our absolute first project when we bought the house. Brian got started right away.

(Don’t you love the lawn chair décor?)

You see a lot of sledge-hammer-full demos on TV, but in reality, demolition is so messy that you try to keep things as neat as possible. So we used a variety of saws to cut the drywall out in throw-away sized pieces.

We were doing a lot of work, so I didn’t get a lot of pictures, but once we got the wall down, Brian put up some new jack and king studs and a nice, new 2x10 header.

As messy as everything was, it was so nice to feel the new openness.

We got to fixing the drywall right away. Working on this house was like Grandpa’s and my full time job.

Clearly at this point, we had a long way to go, but eventually, we got this.

What a difference! I can’t even imagine our house without our great big opening, and you know, I even talk about making it bigger and more open!

Have you had any single changes that made your house feel so different?