Okay, before you think we are all nuts here… we KNEW that there used to be a sliding glass window between the office and the living room! It had been drywalled up before we moved in, but it was very apparent it was there because whomever did the work, didn’t do a very good job.
One of the things that has really bugged us is our very very very dark living room. Since our old farmhouse is 110 years old… and a multi-generational home… it was added on and porches enclosed and such to it’s current situation. And unfortunately, somewhere along the line, the living room ended up without any outside windows!!! DARK CITY…
Well, I was thinking about this over and over and when my friend Miss Julia came over one day, we just got to thinking… wonder if there is a header and proper wall design to support opening up that opening!!! (She is an encouraging lady!)
So, we thought… why not take back a piece of the drywall in the office, that was already pretty nasty, and peek in there, see what we have. If it’s not right, we’ll just patch that peek hole. If it looks good, we’ll open it up! What did we have to loose? A little bit of drywall repair???
Well, guess what!!! It was AWESOME…. there is a good header in there and just two little 2 x 4s to keep the drywall from collapsing…. so we just cut that baby outta there with a drywall hand saw and a little bit of womanly gusto!!! Maggie removed the two studs for us and OH MY GOSH!!! LIGHT!!! LIGHT!!!!
And a little mess.
Okay, we do have to do a little trim work, but hey, that’s half the house! It all needs trim!!! We’re hoping to get a little more trim done this holiday season.
But in the meanwhile, we finally have light!!! It’s magnificent!!!
Of course, this meant some moving around of the furniture and such.
We started with the big entertainment center in there. But it was quickly apparent that it was not good in there. Just too big and dark. Since we had originally planned to use it as a wall unit in the spare room, we decided to take it out.
Jessy and Miss Julia spent the afternoon really cleaning and sorting all the rock company stock and boxes and such. Getting ready for the holiday rush! It’s going to be here sooner than we know! I should take a picture of it all cleaned up in there, it looks fantastic now!
Our dining room had been a little smooshed in there with the piano in there as well as the table and spinning wheel and such. So we decided to move the piano into the living room as a focal piece. We love it so much. It’s so lovely to hear it played every day… all three of us are playing the thing. I’ve been teaching the girls more and more about chords and two hand playing but they also just like to fool around with it. Pure happiness… love that piano!
We had those two little light brown cabinets in the studio and we thought they would make an excellent little simple tv stand. It’s actually perfect. All the DVD and VHS players and game consoles fit in the glass door side and all our DVDs and such fit in the drawers. We don’t have a huge collection at all. We tend to prefer to rent a DVD or use our Blockbuster account for watching so we don’t buy many DVDs. A few though, just because we really like a series or movie. And the girls have a good number of games and such, so they keep the current ones in the drawers. Works out AWESOME….
We moved some of the sentimental stuff that was in the big entertainment center into our lovely memory hutch, and moved it to the entry area, seen in the above picture as the dark cabinet on the right hand side. I got all my scrapbooks into the bottom and some lovely things up in the top display area. Needs a little better organization, but it’s way cool that everything fits in there nicely.
My beloved Grandma Mildred’s table sits nicely in there, and we just adore this room now! I’ve noticed that we’re actually USING the living room now! (What’s next, cable TV?????) It’s so wonderful to see sunlight in there! And it’s kind of neat that poor Jessy is now part of the family instead of being sort of stuffed away in her office. Once we get the wood burner going, I suspect the open floor plan will help to get the heat to circulate nicely as well!
Several folk asked about a floor plan for our old house, just to sort of get an idea of how it all works together. So here you go! Not to scale really, but pretty close to how it all works together. Maybe someday I’ll try and do a measured plot, but right now, this sort of gives you an understanding of the big old house! It doesn’t seem as large as it is from the road. Many people think it’s really small, but it’s over 2,000 square feet, and we have a lot of unused space really. Big old house!!!
So that is the wall adventure!!! We love it. Still need to do trim, but we also need to repaint the ceiling and probably will repaint the walls a lighter color soon… and then trim and then some sort of nicer flooring. All in good time. We have a few priorities ahead of decorating the room, but now that it’s all open and lovely, it just might move up the priority list a tad bit!!!
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