After scraping the ceilings of the entire first floor of the new house (which took an excruciatingly-long amount of time) we moved on to knocking down a wall. Side note, if you missed our post about the ceiling scraping event, check it out here.
This is the wall. In all its glory.
The anticipation of this knock-down has been months in the making. Being able to knock down this wall was one of the (main) reasons we got the house. You see, the house was divided into two parts: the regular house and a mother-in-law apartment. All our visions and plans about the house revolved around being able to knock down this wall. Our realtor (shoutout to Ted Larson at Bjorklund Realty!), my parents and the inspector all thought, with as much certainty as they could muster without actually opening up the wall, that it was NOT a load-bearing wall. However, we’ve all seen enough HGTV shows to know that things go wrong and both Brett and I figured it was our luck to get the wall that was load bearing. Our history is usually, if it could go wrong, it would.
The same wall, from the mother-in-law apartment.
So it’s Tuesday morning and we’re ready to go. The outlet covers have been removed. The doors and door frames have been taken down. The cabinets from the kitchenette in the apartment have been torn out. Everything is prepped and ready to go; all we had to do was start breaking through walls and seeing what happened.
Cabinets = OUT.
If you have never had the pleasure of experiencing ‘demo day,’ then I assure you, it is FUN. There is no feeling like being able to expel any pent up frustrations or anger or excitement by taking a hammer to a wall and not caring about ‘hurting’ anything. So, we swung, sweated and tore down all the sheetrock and as luck would have it, it was in fact not a load-bearing wall. Thank goodness we didn’t have that headache to worry about – I am sure there will be plenty more down the road.
Look at that mess… Almost done!
All in all, it took about three hours to remove all the sheetrock. After that, Brett worked on the electricity, which ended up being a bigger headache than we anticipated. Apparently the electrical box was quite the cluster and he had to re-route a few wires and take out the ones that weren’t being used.
While he played electrician, I attempted the first step to cleaning. Although demo-day is a lot of fun, it is also messy. Add the sheetrock and dust to the already dirty house from scraping the ceilings and one can only imagine the dirt, dust and crap lying everywhere. I guess we better get used to that part – welcome to living in a renovation home, right?
The finished product? Even better than we imagined! It really opens up the entire space and provides limitless possibilities for design and décor. See below 🙂
Being able to knock this off the list is such a big win; we’re even more excited about the possibilities than before The Knockdown. We’ve got a long road ahead of us and we aren’t even close to being halfway done, but we were able to check off two very taxing projects in only two days! Here’s to many, many more projects being checked off the list.
All our best,
Wow! That really opened that up. Congratulations on a successful demo. 🙂
Thanks Melissa! It definitely opened up the entire room and we are so happy that we were able to knock it down with too many problems.
I am so inspired by you two!!!!! I cannot wait to come and see this beauty you two are creating!! 🙂 XOXO
Thank you Chele! We can’t wait for you and Pat to visit!! Kins too, of course!
Hard to get the proper angles in my head but the idea works. Great job!!
Thank you Ray! We’d like to put up a floor plan, just to give a better idea of the layout so it is a little better to visualize.
Excellent work. If I haven’t told you before I am very proud of both of you and the huge, huge project you are taking on. Just think when you are done you can say “This is just what we wanted!”
Thank you! That moment of being done and being able to take it all in might be a few years off, but at least it is something to shoot for 🙂