#DemoDay

We may be knee deep in moving and renovations, but we created a podcast anyway! We were pretty tired, so give us grace! :)

Click here to listen.

I told you when I first shared the story of how we met our new house that it was pretty impeccable. The former owners took amazing care of this house and in truth, we could have given it a good once-over cleaning and moved right in. But where's the fun in that?? You gotta make a new house your own, right??

And so we have been.

I'll show you official before and after pictures later, when I have an after to show, but I'll start by telling you about the not-quite-full wall.

One of the things Ryan and I hoped for in a new home was an open concept between the living room and the kitchen. Ryan's Greentown house did not have that. His kitchen there was down a hallway from the living room. My house didn't have that either. The dining room separated the kitchen from the living room.

And you know what? That's okay! Some people prefer defined and separated rooms. But I love to cook and love to be able to continue in conversation with Ryan while I'm cooking. That's hard to do when you have to yell around corners and through other rooms. So we really hoped for open concept.

And this new house of ours did not have it. To its credit, those two rooms were at least next to each other, which was a step up from what we'd owned before, but they were still divided.

The wall that divided them didn't go clear to the top. It went up to about two feet from the ceiling and then just stopped. The day we walked through the house for the first time, Ryan declared if we bought this house, he would pull that wall down to just above the sink and make it open for us to have easy conversation.

I was eager to just move in, and a big mess didn't sound entirely appealing. I suggested we wait a year or so, see if we really hated the closed off wall, and then if we did, we could change it then. Later. After life settled. Ryan was okay with that for about a day, and then he convinced me it really would be better to take care of it before anything was officially moved in.

And let the record show: he was right. That demo made a HUGE mess. Much  more than I ever expected. I probably would have been cleaning dust for 32 years if we'd waited until the house was full of stuff.

So the day after we walked in as owners for the first time, Ryan and his friend Troy held Shafferland demo day to take down that wall. {Please note that I was not able to be there for this, and Ryan set up the tripod and took pictures of the process for our scrapbook. One million points. He also wrote #demoday on the wall and channeled his inner Chip Gaines.}

By the time I came home, they had a pretty good mess going on:

The wall coming down made a HUGE difference. So much more light and open. And these two had a blast ripping stuff up. Of course any wall ripped down means repairs, so there was much patching and mudding and sanding to knock out after this was over, but it certainly was a fine start to our new home together!

Troy, thanks so much for helping us - and for coming back over on subsequent days to patch what was left behind!!