And the Wall Comes Down

Progress. It's a good thing! Already our main living area feels much roomier...the 20 or so square feet behind the kitchen/living room wall has always functioned as, well, not much. Sometimes a kid's play area but most of the time empty and unused! It now has a new lease on life with traffic running smoothly through it each day. It's good to be loved.

Here's how Eric spent his week of vacation...please note that all the parts where I say "we" in reference to work done, it really means "he". :)

First, off comes the drywall:


Halfway down and realizing the building materials used were, ah, crap. The wiring was spliced and then wrapped with tape dangling inside the header. Electrical rerouting probably took the most time as he had to get the wires leading to both the kitchen and living room overhead lights to go flush up into the ceiling and over to the column with the switches.


With the wall down, next up was to tackle the floor. We are going to use the space leading up to the unused back door as our new back entryway when the sliding doors are gone, so we needed to continue the kitchen tile to that door. That meant removing any existing tile that had been trimmed against the old wall. Yay for Dremel tools.


Already we could feel the difference!


We borrowed Jerry's wet saw (thanks!) and he went to work using lots of math for all the angles. I knew there was a good reason to marry a math minor.




And then the grout. I actually am the go-to grout person around here. Makes me feel like I've done something other than stand around looking pretty while he does the dirty work! (I wrote about our adventures when we first put this floor in several years back. Some of it is here.) It's wet in this pic, dries to match the tile.


And here is a picture from this afternoon. I scootched the table over since the grout has cured, though I still need to seal it. What a major difference! The tiny wall space between the doors is almost ready to paint or whatever we're doing. Matching the living room's faux finish might be tricky so I'm hoping to use the golden yellow...hmmm. I'm also going to continue painting all our trim the nice creamy white we started with in the office redo. I'm serious about getting rid of all this golden oak people. To be continued.....