One Wall Down

As expected, we spent most of the weekend cleaning up after the demo and I have a feeling the "clean up" will continue every day for the next few months as we attempt to control the dust level in the house.  It's just the price of living in a construction zone! We also pulled all the old electrical wire, removed most of the nails from the old beams, and took down one of the old walls to start opening up the living room.  We're knocking out the nails and saving the old 2 x 4s as they're really nice old wood.  At some point in the future (namely, after we have a functioning first floor again), we'll use the old wood to build furniture or for other projects.

We also spent a good bit of the day planning the layout and making sure that we are happy with the floor plans.  If there's one thing we've learned throughout this renovation, it's that we have a tendency to make small but noticeable changes once we start laying things out in real life as opposed to just looking at the plans on paper.  The old part of the first floor will change from housing a living room, dining room, galley kitchen, two small bedrooms and a full bathroom to a living room, mud room, den/guest bedroom/office with full bath, half bath, and pantry.  In short, nothing will be left untouched and we'll be opening up a good bit of the existing support walls as well.  The load bearing walls run horizontally across the width of the house so we'll leave those walls up until the beams arrive. As it is, we'll have to build a couple of temporary walls before we can install the beams but there's no need to build extras when we can use the old walls instead.  The next few weekends will probably be a fair amount of work as we get the first floor and basement ready for framing.  We're back in the prep phase but making progress!