I’ve been pretty busy with the smashy smashy the last week, and have am mostly done with the demo at House #2. Two of the walls I planned on moving are down to the studs, the master bedroom is down to the studs, and the existing bath is now tile-less.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t firmed up things on the contractor front yet. Swapped a few emails and phone calls with Promising Contractor, so he hasn’t totally gone AWOL on me, but he sounds pretty busy, and nothing is definite yet. Which makes me a bit nervous, but not terribly so,as I’ve discovered a few nice time-saving, budget-shrinking surprises when ripping out walls.

For the small, odd room in the interior of the house that I’m expanding so it can serve as a dining room, it appears to have been exactly that in a former incarnation, as I uncovered framing for a much larger doorway leading to it, that had simply been left in place when a new, smaller door was framed in and added. I’d originally planned on taking more of the wall out but it’s load bearing and I think simply making the entry much larger (using the original framing) will accomplish 90% of the same effect, as far as opening the room up, so I can live with that.

The wall that separated the odd, small room from the kitchen isn’t load-bearing, so I can take it all out with no real worries. I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to take it out all the way to the ceiling or not, but either way the framing modifications are simple enough that I can tackle it myself, knocking yet another framing job I was worried about off the contractor’s list.

What I’m not sure about, though, is the last of my planned smashing of walls. Which brings us to the title of this post, and where I could use the help of all you smart folks in the audience.

I’d planned on knocking a hole in the wall of the front living room, and adding arches or a rectangular cutout for a breakfast bar type set-up. My main motivation was to try to make the front living room flow better with the rest of the house and, more importantly, get some more light into the interior of the house, as there’s not much in the way of natural light.

The problem, though, is that the front living room is an addition, and the wall I want to carve a hole into is not only load-bearing, but it was formerly an exterior wall, with sheetrock tacked onto the exterior wood sheathing when it was enclosed. So it’s going to be a bit of a bitch to tear down, and likely will require a fairly hefty new header to be put in, due to the load bearing nature of the wall and the fairly large hole I planned to cut into it.

Long story short, I’m second-guessing my plan to open up that wall by adding arches or some other sort of hole. But the layout as it is seems awkward to me. Part of that, though, may simply be because I don’t really think in terms of separate sitting rooms and what-not, so the fact that the front living room is separated from the rest of the house by a big, long wall seems troublesome, and not a selling point, etc.

Here’s a quick photo dump of the room in question, along with a very crude layout of the house as is.

So the big blank wall shown in the first few is the wall in question, that currently completely separates Living Room #1 and Living Room #2. The fourth photo is from inside Living Room #2, and the wall with the wood paneling and shelves is where the hole would be, which would open it up to Living Room #1.

Another difficulty is that Living Room #1 is sunken, relative to Living Room #2, so the hole would have to be cut reasonably high on the side of Living Room #1 so as not to look really silly and midget-height when viewed from Living Room #2. Living Room #1 is pretty long, nearly 30 feet, so it’s a bit bigger in real life than it appears in the photos.

So yeah. I keep flip-flopping back and forth, and need to make a decision soon. I’m leaning towards leaving it as is, and trying to stage it so that it appears a bit more natural. I think some art on that big long blank wall would go a long way, as well as tile flooring, so that it looks a bit more formal than the cozier Living Room #2 inside the house. The lack of light bothers me, but I already planned on adding recessed lighting in Living Room #2, so that should help somewhat. Leaving the wall as-is would not only save a lot of money but also time, as the bulk of the contractor work would then by the bathroom addition in the back.

Then again, it could be pretty kick ass to open up that wall, as i could add a tiled breakfast bar type area at the bottom of the opening, with stools on one side, which would likely be a plus for couples looking to entertain friends or trying to keep an eye on kids running around the house.

Decisions, decisions…