When my wife and I bought our house a couple years ago, we started counting down the days until I could tear down the wall dividing the kitchen from the living room and open the entire living area up to one huge, open room. We bought the house from the original owner and while she had taken great care of it all these years, it still looked like it did 50 years ago. We have spent a ton of time and money bringing the major systems back up to date, finishing the basement for more room and working on the yard, but the day has finally come to tackle the kitchen and the kitchen remodel is under way.
Our house is a 50's raised ranch in Berkeley and like most 50's raised ranches, has good space but is very divided. The kitchen is tucked away from the dining room and living room in a corner all by itself and is very tiny. I love to cook and entertain so having this small kitchen away from every other part of the house of course created lots of problems. But by taking the main wall dividing the spaces down, most of our problems will be fixed and we should be left with an open kitchen, huge island great for kids and entertaining and tons of natural light which the kitchen was missing too.
We started working on the design for the kitchen back in April and finally fine tuned it enough to start construction this week, only about 3 months later than we intended. As we found out, there is a lot more that goes into doing a new kitchen than just picking out cabinets, counters and appliances. The kitchen will be step one of the major remodel we have for our house. Step two will be adding a master suite and office to the back of the house so we had to plan the addition first to make sure it worked with the kitchen.
The first step of construction is demolition. We planned for this to happen while we were out of town and after moving our entire kitchen and most of the upstairs to the basement, we needed a vacation anyways. Coming home on Tuesday we didn't know what to expect. And while our house is destroyed and will probably be like that for the next 6 weeks, we can already tell such a huge difference in our house and are so excited to see the finished product. Below are some before and after pictures after the first round of demolition.
This is the extent of the original kitchen. We should have about triple the counter space and cabinets once the remodel is finished.
As you can see, the size of the wall that had to come down is pretty substantial and of course it was a load bearing wall. Part of the longer process to get started involved getting a structural engineer to look at the wall and give our contractor plans on how to move forward with it. A sixteen inch beam was placed in the attic and runs the span of the new opening. While this was a major hit to our budget, we felt being able to open this wall up was worth it and would give us the open floor plan we were looking for.
Our house is covered in plastic and will be like this for the foreseable future. While the contractor has done a great job to minimize dust, it is still everywhere so plan accordingly if you start taking down walls.
By lowering the walls around the stairs to half walls, the kitchen and dining room should feel more connected and the amount of natural light we are already getting is night and day.
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