The Dining Room

As promised, this is the story of how we created a dining room from a hallway!

Below is a picture of the hallway when we first moved in. It had a built in shelving unit on the right, and a fridge, washer and dryer on the left. The left is the back wall of the house, and the right is the back wall of the kitchen. The whole hallway was about 8 ft wide, and a real waste of space. There was nowhere to hang clothes, it was very dark, and really boring! Also, the kitchen felt very closed in with just two small doorways on either end. This resulted in a very square and dark kitchen. There are no windows in this part of the house, so lighting is a major issue. We decided that the best thing for us to do was some demolition!

Once we decided that's what we were going to do, we took a step back! I mean could we really take a wall down?

Was it supporting anything?

Would our house fall down?

Luckily one of our friends is a structural engineer so we consulted with him. We determined that it would be ok to take the wall out. So we grabbed some friends and told them to bring their masks and dust suits!

We found some real surprises in the shelving unit ... like an old chimney ... that was never properly supported ... super exciting! So taking the wall down took a little more effort than first planned, but we did it! The picture below shows the hallway with the freezer, and the start of the kitchen. The white board in the bottom right corner shows where the wall used to be.

After ripping out three layers of old linoleum, we got back down to the original pine floorboards in the kitchen and the hallway. We wanted to try to save them, but they were cracked and had too many holes in them. Also, because of the weight of the unsupported chimney, there was a major dip in the floor. From the far wall of the kitchen to the back wall of the hallway it was out almost 2 inches in the middle!

Our next adventure was down in the basement ... well ... more like glorified crawlspace! It's just under 6 feet at the highest point, so it made for some interesting adventures for my tall husband and his taller brother! We installed some steel jack posts after consulting with our engineer friend, and that mostly corrected the problem. We then used our subfloor to further level the floors, another weekend adventure!

The final stage was painting the walls a light sand color and installing a dark hardwood floor. It really highlights the high ceilings and the dark wood furniture that we have. Last weekend we installed our new ceiling light, finally replacing the contractor special that was up there!! Now the kitchen and dining room is one big room, over 200 square feet in size.

Ta-daa!! Doesn't look much like a hallway anymore!!