It’s the new year!
Hooray! Happy New year to you and yours!
We are all back into the daily grind by now; or at least trying to be.
The grind where, up here in Canada, you bundle up and clench your teeth and barely survive the freezing cold temperatures – all while taking the kids to school.
It is also a time here at this little estate to show you some new pictures of our old (but new to us) living room.
In our last post I shared some pictures of the space, but here are some more detailed shots to show you the old living room in all of its glory.
Some of you asked about the hefty built in that took hours to take apart because it was so well made.
1954 Construction was no joke.
I’ve got some pictures to share with you, but first here is the other side of the rooms before shot.
In the room there were also two dividers made from the same product that matched the built in. You can spy one of them here…
Between the built in and the shelving units the area beyond the front door of our home was visually separated from the other part of the long room.
As I had mentioned, the middle of the built in doubled as a pass through from the kitchen to the dining area. Although it was a smart design and well made, the space didnt work for our family. As someone who does a lot of cooking, I dreamt of cooking in our new kitchen and yet still keeping an eye on our three tornadoes.
And that one.
Here you can see all the way to the kitchen from the living room. If you closed the door and the built in the rooms were completely separate and closed off from each other. It would be a big process to take down everything and add in the proper support in place of all of this, but we were up to the challenge.
The part of the room past the dinging area we wanted to utilize as our living room or family room. It was the perfect size for all the plans we had talked about when dreaming of a new home to renovate.
We knew a lot of the space had to go before we could put in the things we were wanting. So we made a plan.
Our plan started by making the first phase of a “NEED list” for this living room and dining room area. It read like this:
New ceiling (Paneled with beams)
New lighting in ceiling
New insulation in ceiling
New windows
New front door
New electrical
Move the intake and outake air system to where it should be
Later we ended up having to add to the list:
Replace insulation in walls
Spray foam walls
Drywall all walls
We figured with a list that kept on growing we should cut it off at some point. Besides, the NEED list was enough to keep us busy for a while, so we stopped there. Also, we figured that the list couldn’t actually grow any bigger because it was quickly eating up our living area budget.
All the home DIY ers KNOW!!!!
Of course this didn’t keep me from making the mental list.
Our living room “WISH list” includes:
Pretty dining room chandelier
Gas fireplace (’cause CANADA)
Built in book shelves flanking the living room window
A window seat
Pretty wall treatments
Pretty paint
Obviously you know with all the “pretty” describing that list that the things on it are less for function and more for aesthetics. Being an adult is hard sometimes.
#adulting
#makinghardchoices
I still cant help really wanting a fireplace these days though. 😉
#canadianproblems
#frozentoes
Before we could put things back together and cross off accomplishments from our living room “NEED List” everything had to come apart. We started by taking down the dropped ceiling.
And the built in…
As a reminder here is what the view from the kitchen to the living area looked like before we started to take things apart.
And here is the view without the wall and built in obstructing the line of vision.
Again, here is the before from the opposite side of the living space…
And here is how it looked with a lot of the room taken apart.
As you know we love to reuse and re purpose things so we took apart the hefty built in very carefully as you can see in the above picture. From chatting with other design enthusiasts and green minded people I have discovered that Im not the only one who cringes when a perfectly good kitchen in a television design show gets demolished.
It has long been a pet peeve of mine (also so is the word pet peeve!) when resusable kitchens and bathrooms arent given to habitat for humanity and instead get dragged off to the dump. At least drag it to the curb so all of us who are interested can take what we want. 😉
This lovingly made built in wasn’t about to get that kind of treatment. I will keep you updated on what we end up doing with the giant cuts of wood. I’ve already got some ideas.
Obviously there are always times to demolition things and act like a psycho. 😉
As always there are also times to involve the kids in projects and to ummmm shake out some of the wiggles. 😉
Pretty sure this is a nine year old boys dream, right there!
In renovations, things have to get really bad before they can get better…
Im talking dozens of trips to the dump before we caved and spent some of the reno budget on a dumpster. Not wher the “pretty list maker” wants to spend her pennies. 😉
And because side by side before and afters are my favorite….
What do you think? Does this demo mess make you itchy too? What things would you add to a “WISH List”?? And most importantly, HOW exactly would you convince your partner that a fireplace was needed ASAP?
