Long time, no see

So sorry to everyone one out there about not posting anything about the house in the past almost 2 months. We have been really busy with the house and I have slowed down a lot due to our exciting discovery that I'm pregnant :D! After I graduated from college, house demolition of the downstairs was put into full throttle. The upstairs is absolutely finished with an exception of 1/4 round trim along the window edges and sides of the stairs. Since Matthew was itching to take the concrete, load barring wall down, he stopped doing the little detail work upstairs and began planning the take down of the wall downstairs (which is fine with me because I can do the little detail work and feel some kind of useful).

So demolition of the load barring wall began. It took a little while because we had to figure out how big our timbers would be to support the upstairs, where the posts would go to hold up the horizontal timber, and how much we needed to level out the floor before beginning the process. So in the beginning this is what the house looked like with the load barring wall:

The load barring wall separated the kitchen from where we originally thought the dining room was going to go (we determined it was too small of a space to put a table and chairs and just extended the kitchen into that space). It was also right in the middle of the space we decided would be the living room. So once the wall was taken out this is what we hope it will look like:

We began with taking the wall out of the center of the living room because we decided that taking half of the load barring wall out first and then putting in supports before tearing out the other side was the best idea. This is the wall before it came down (my husband and my brother-in-law are discussing the plans):

They began by cutting the wall with a concrete blade just to separate the sides (after supporting the upstairs of course) and then knocked away with a sledge hammer (which is why there is a little whole in the wall in the left of the picture).

The wall came out with ease. The things you see in the center of the picture/room are what was our temporary supports for the upstairs. Once we received our timber support beams we measured them, sanded them, and put the extremely heavy things into place. Below you can see them in the right half of the picture with the remaining load barring wall to the left.

So here we just did exactly as we had done before. We made sure the upstairs was supported with a temporary support and then used a sledge hammer to knock the wall out. Here is the after picture:

This picture doesn't show the beams in place for the other (left) side but I will post pictures in my next update once it is finished. Everything is super open right now which is something I'm not a big fan of. I like a little separation which will be fixed once we build the walls up around the supports.

Steffane B.