My No Demo Reno

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You know those HGTV shows where they’re going to remodel a house and first they have a ‘demo day’?

That special day where everyone swings sledgehammers into walls and cabinets they hate?

And drywall and bricks and two-by-fours go flying??

Well that’s exactly what I had in mind for this house.

I was going to tear down walls and take out posts and open things up!

I had big plans!

I have re-designed this house in my mind and on paper so many times. (Even way before we bought it, when it still belonged to my parents, I would think about how I would change it.)

There was going to be a huge great room, dining room and kitchen — totally open concept.

Now I knew that some of the walls and posts I wanted to move were structural. But that didn’t bother me. I know that anything can be done

with the right plan, the right engineering, and the right professionals.

And while that may be true, we soon discovered that

Of course, anything can be done…

If you throw enough money at it!

Turns out, the whole roof of this whole house basically rests on just 2 posts — exactly the ones I wanted to move.

And it would cost close to what you would pay for a new SUV…

This is the wall between the living room and the dining room. It’s one of the walls I wanted to take out. You can see how it would open up the space right?

But first of all, the post on the very left is load-bearing and it’s carrying most of the weight of the roof for this half of the house. And secondly, the wall to the right is not only carrying roof load, it’s a shear wall which basically means it keeps the house from collapsing in an earthquake.

Go figure…

I guess it’s a no-go on that one…

Here’s the same wall from the living room side.

And let me show you how they look now

This is the short dining room wall (where the dark bar was). I’m so glad this wall is still here now so I have a place to put my buffet!

And this is the living room side of the same wall.

If that wall was gone - I wouldn’t have any place to put my armoire!

And then there’s this little wall in the kitchen with the microwave in it. (There was a make-shift pantry behind it that we took out and now there’s a little hallway on the other side which is the original configuration when the house was built). Inside this wall, on the left-hand side is a post that — you guessed it — holds up the roof! There is also electrical and gas for the cooktop in there that would have no other placer to go.

So it seems that despite my big plans to make big changes in this house, this is largely a ‘no demo reno’.

And you know what?

The longer we live here and the more we strip away the 70s and 80s, I feel like this little house is just happy to return to its roots with all of its walls intact.

And I’m starting to love it just like it is.

And besides, I’ve been hearing that ‘full open concept’ floor plans are making way for ‘partial open concept’ floor plans in the future.

So I guess this little house knows what’s best after all…

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