Kitchen & Dining Room Demo Begins

Nearly every great home renovation project begins with some demo.  While the amount of demo may vary, a true renovation project often gets uglier before it gets prettier.  Recently I’ve been sharing how this project came about and what our plans are for the kitchen part of the project.  To get the project started, there had to be some demo.

Fortunately for us, we already did a lot of the necessary room renovations in the dining room last year.  That gave us good bones to start with. The only demo we had to do was opening up the french doors between the dining room and family room and opening the door way to the current laundry/room pantry.

We can’t completely remove the wall between the living and dining room because there is a ceiling height change and we didn’t think we’d be able to add proper structure without it. There are also heating pipes that we can’t easily move so we made the most of the space we had.

B started by opening up the wall to see how the current framing is.  We discovered that the french doors were not original to the house and the opening we were planning is almost exactly how the house was originally built.  No special framing required.

The back wall that we planned to open up into the current laundry room has no structural significance so it was just a matter of creating the opening adding a header and framing.  B got most of this work done pretty easily.

From there he moved on to the wall where the cabinets will be placed.  He removed the drywall where the back-splash will go so that he could add in the cement board.  He also removed the built-in china hutch because this is the space that will hold the refrigerator.  You can see this in the above photo as well.

The last thing to do was take down the faux wainscoting from the walls where the cabinets are going to go.

Now that demo is mostly complete, the vision is beginning to take shape.  Between the larger opening to the living room and the doorway to the former pantry / laundry room, the dining room feels bigger and more open, perfect for the future kitchen.