We are about to go where most homeowner remodelers fear to tread... removing a bearing wall.  Since we moved into this house a few years ago, we've been banging are heads against this wall, thinking, there must be a better way to do the floor plan in this house but what is it?  As much as we tried to skirt the issue, the truth is that removing the bearing wall is the best answer to our dilemma.

Our current home with the load-bearing wall still in place:

The house currently has a pretty typical floor plan.  You walk in the front door and you are in a tiny foyer.  The stairs to the 2nd floor are on your left, adjacent to the wall of the garage (at least, half of the garage wall because in actuality the garage sticks out toward the street on the left of the house). 

A hallway stretches out in front of you; you can see right out the back patio door from there.  The hallway has a bathroom off of it to the right, and right in front of you as you enter the front door is a door to the coat closet.  Turn right, and you walk into the living room.  Walk through the living room, and there is a large header over an opening into the little dining room.  You have now reached the back half of the house, the long part of the L which forms the main living section.  As you turn left you move from the dining room opening through a narrower opening into the current kitchen.  Now you have "open concept" because the kitchen has a peninsula overlooking a small nook area (where the patio door is), beyond which is another large header over an opening into the family room (which is about to become our kitchen).  I like open concept - the only problem is it doesn't include the living room in the current plan.

It took us a long time to settle on moving the kitchen into the so-called family room.  We've actually been using it for our home office, but it's not ideal for that.  It's too small to be a family room for us, and it has an elongated shape that makes it awkward for furniture, TV etc. It has a fireplace, but it's kind of an ugly one which we've never used.  (If we do follow through with the plan to put the kitchen in the family room, which we probably will, the plans call for the future placement of a brick wood-fired pizza oven in there instead of the fireplace.)

Here's what we have come up with as our solution to the floor plan that just isn't working for us.  It give us a spacious kitchen and dining area (which also serves as our home school, so it's important in many ways) adjoining our cozy but just-big-enough living room. The office gets less square footage, but it will serve our needs (I already checked - the furniture fits!). 

So, with the kitchen now tucked into the end of the long part of the L of our first floor, there seems to be potential to create more family/living room space out of the remaining area, keeping it open to the kitchen and dining area (basically, the nook and the current kitchen mostly become the new dining room).  The plan now is to have the living room primarily in the location of the old dining room and part of the old kitchen, as well as keeping part of the current living room as part of the future one... a larger space within view of the kitchen and dining room.

But remember that header beam I mentioned?  When you walk from the current living room to the current dining room, there's a big header over the opening.  This is part of the loadbearing wall, which continues for another 8'4" forming the wall between the living room and current kitchen.  The load bearing wall then goes on to form the back of the bathroom wall, continues in headers across the hallway and an entrance to the basement, then ends in a pillar.

We would like to take out those 8'4" of wall, as we simultaneously take out the wall that separates the kitchen and dining room (not a load bearing wall) and instead build a half-wall several feet closer to the new kitchen to make more room for the living room and a more manageable-sized dining room (much larger than the old one but not gargantuan.) We will need to make a new header, one that can span the entire length of the opening between the old living room and the old dining room and kitchen... a total of 16'11".  We are also building a new wall creating an office out of what is left of the old living room space.  Eventually we will also build a screened-in porch or 3-season room off the front of our house, which overlooks a park across the street.

Back to the load-bearing wall we are removing. We have a handyman that agreed to work with us on the various projects surrounding our remodel.  He doesn't know about the extent of this project yet, but he did mention that all you'd have to do is replace the load-bearing wall with a header to transfer the weight.  He agreed to work with us by the hour, so we are still going to try to do a lot of this ourselves. Therefore, we want to know what we are in for. 

I found some helpful articles online:

Calculating Loads on Headers and Beams

and

Sizing Engineered Beams and Headers

This is where I'm starting from at least.  I'll be back to let you know what, if anything, I've learned. 

Something tells me this will involve math.  I was never very good at math.

Posted by Caeli at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, since it's never all that fun to have just one remodeling project going on, we've started the kitchen.

<Insert terrifying scream here>

We have some resources from the sale of a rental property and so we are tackeling the biggest project to date.  It's absolutely clear that when we're finished, we'll have a wonderful family space and it can really be the start of a great lifestyle change.  We just have to get through it in one piece!

We've gone through so many iterations and design choices already.  The first big decision is where to put the kitchen.  We're fortunate enough to have the space to convert a roughly 21x13 space into a kitchen.  It's the "family room" in the original design, but we just use the living room for family gatherings now, so we have pretty much a blank slate. 

The first thing we've discovered is that all of the mid-level cabinet makers hide behind the term "engineered wood", making to sound fancy, but it's really particleboard.  So the drawer may be solid wood, but the box for the cabinet is basically compressed and glued sawdust.  So we are exploring real plywood construction to see if it fits in the budget.  Right now, we figure the cabinets are the first and most critical thing to get right, so the search continues.

Posted by Caeli at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The playroom in the basement has begun to be transformed, during the few hours here and there that my husband has found to work on it.  Here are some of the playroom photos of the process to date.

At the beginning of the adventure, this was the state of things in the playroom. 

As you can see, there used to be a farm mural in the playroom.  I painted the scenery and sky, and my mother painted the barn and details around it. 

My brother-in-law, with his weird sense of humor, painted this many-uttered Holstein cow (the brand is the Green Bay Packers logo, though that's hard to see here):

The kids had enjoyed playing in the farm playroom, but thanks to the water-dumping AC unit, we now had to rip apart one of the walls, even cutting out some of the studs, to get rid of mold.  So the mural had to go.

There had been chair rail around the room too, but now that was gone, and the bookshelves we had installed to hold the toys had been taken out, and the holes spackled.

The carpet was up, the fans and dehumidifier were on to dry out the concrete floor, which had been scrubbed with bleach water.

The next step was painting the walls.  Then white beadboard wainscotting was put on three of the walls (Georgia Pacific pre-finished stuff), and the subfloor material was put down over the concrete, the seams taped.  On the bottom was a plastic underlayment, Delta FL, which has dimples that allow room for moisture to drain should there be any wetness under the floor. 

 Then came a black felt underlayment, typical stuff for laminate floors.  Then the click-together laminate floor itself.  I had suggested we consider installing it at an angle, and although it isn't as straightforward nor as quick as installing the planks parallel to the wall, it gives the playroom a more updated feel, even perhaps more spacious-feeling. Hard to tell that from this picture with some of the playroom stuff finding it's way back into the room, but trust me.  Watch for future photos when we get it all done.

A hugely important part of this project was creating smarter storage for toys, books and games in the playroom.  Before, we had all open shelving.  We shelled out a chunk of change for utiltiy cabinet kits from Lowes (frustrating for their missing parts and poor directions, but not too bad looking in the end), and this is our new playroom storage system:

A flat-screen TV will go in the center, and with the addition of a comfy couch and some old armchairs we have in a back room, this will become a usable home theater, at least for the kids when they have friends over. 

So that is the basement playroom remodel as it stands right now.  We are simultaneously planning a remodel of our first floor, most importantly the kitchen remodel, so stay tuned for pictures of that remodeling project as it progresses. 

Posted by Caeli at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)