Ch, ch, changes.....

In my last post I hinted at big changes afoot.  In fact, this is the single biggest change we are making to the house in this entire project.  Have you figured it out yet?  I'll give you a hint:  There's one section of the house that we haven't really done much work on yet.

Yup, that's right.  We finally settled on a floor plan for the main living area of the house.  And on Saturday, the walls came down!  And you won't believe the difference it made.  But first, some before photos to set the stage.

View from the front door.  Living room to the left.

The living room looking at the door to the dining room.

The living room looking toward the hallway & family room

The dining room looking at the door to the kitchen 

The dining room looking to the living room & kitchen.

The view down the hallway from the bedroom end toward the kitchen wall (with the "x")

The view from the other end of the hallway (I'm standing against the X from the last photo).

Got it?  No?  Well, here's an image of the floor plan when we bought the house:

We knew when we bought the house, we wanted to open it up some and expand the kitchen, but the question was how?  And let me tell you, this has been a huge source of stress for me during this process.  It seems simple, until you start looking at structural issues.  For example, we found out pretty quickly that the wall between the kitchen & the family room was the only load bearing wall in the house.  Which meant that if we wanted to open it up, we had to put in a beam.  

Ann, my designer friend, came up with a wonderful floor plan that opened up to the back with an island and a formal dining room.  But after consulting with the structural engineer, we found out that if we wanted to open the back all the way up, we'd need to either end the beam over an existing post in the basement or add a new post.  Now, we didn't want to add a new post since we hope to finish the basement one day and there are already plenty of posts down there.  And, if we wanted to end over an existing post, that put a column right in the middle of our island.  :(  

After much discussion and angst, we decided to leave the back alone and open to the front.  So, working off of another floor plan that Ann drew up for us, we finally settled on this:

Ignore the random island in what is really the 2nd/3rd bedrooms, it's left over from some design work.

Basically we took out all the walls and widened the doorways to the family room.  It's not perfect, but it is nice, and now with the walls down, you can really see the difference.

View from the front door.  Living room to the left. 

Living room, looking toward the dining room (left) and kitchen (right).

Former wall between living room & kitchen.

View from the former hallway looking into the kitchen/dining room.

Wide view of the entire space, you can see the family room in the background.

 So, I had to give up my formal dining room, but I'm getting a  huge pantry and a large island.  And I didn't have to add any more posts to the basement.  Also, we had hoped to put in a powder room on the main floor, but since the is not plumbing stack large enough on that side of the house, and it would have been expensive to add one, so we had to scrap that as well.  Maybe one day.

But that's the big change.  And with some help from Alan's cousin Rick, they already have the electric roughed in for the kitchen as well as a good portion of the plumbing.  Next week, I'm going to start shopping for cabinets....