Wall Comes Tumbling Down

Upon our return from vacations to Maui and the Coast Range, Boo and I started to feel the pressure of the approaching end-of-summer. We were refreshed from our journeys, though, and ready to get after the next step in getting this old house fully functional. Today's post documents that next step. The actual demo was performed over the course of 2 full weekends, one in early summer and one after LeisureFest.

Rough Plan

wall gone

In a post in April, I described the tear out of the old kitchen cabinets. They were g-nasty. Smashing those and hauling them away was strangely satisfying... but totally gross. Once the cabinets were gone, the kitchen work sat idle while we focused on other things, and considered our options. Before we can really get into the kitchen, we have to solve for the furnace in the middle of the room. Again, I have no idea who thought this install was a good idea, but it's flat-stupid in our opinion... which seems to be shared with everyone who has visited since. We start, then, with moving the furnace.

On surface, this feels hard. The existing furnace is a down-draft, feeding the distribution system in the crawlspace through a big rectangular hole in the floor, drawing cold air from above. It is a modern furnace, however, installed in 2019, and it can be installed horizontally without modifications. So, our initial thought is to install it into the crawlspace, re-using the hole in the floor for the cold air return. The complexity is in the gas and combustion exhaust. This furnace is not 95% or higher efficiency, so the combustion must exit through a stovepipe / chimney as it is not just CO2. We are considering getting an electric furnace (not a heat pump purely for cost reasons) and selling off the gas furnace. The location of the furnace in the crawlspace remains the same, this would just eliminate the gas line and exhaust problem. All the other install challenges would remain, starting with creating a crawlspace trapdoor through which the furnace can fit.

mid-move of temporary kitchen

Logically, we then shift our thinking around putting a trapdoor in the floor. Before we can go too far down that path, however, we need to think about what parts of the floor be occupied by a cabinet later. Since the door to the garage is not moving, and it will not be blocked by a cabinet, we are tentatively planning to have the trapdoor there. With the furnace and trapdoor set aside, we can think about the kitchen. We know the wall between the kitchen and the rest of the house is not a support wall. We decided early on that the wall would go away, opening up the kitchen from a 4-walled, enclosed by doors space into a 3-walled open concept. So, I started tearing down wall. Sort of. I did the kitchen half at this point. To do the living-space side, more steps were needed.

Clear Out

When we first moved in, we did not occupy the kitchen. We set up a temporary kitchen space just on the other side of the about-to-be-eliminated wall. In order to have room for demo, and moving the furnace, etc. everything that was at that end of the house needed to move. So, we consolidated again, this time into the front living room / foyer. Cabinets full of food and dishes, the fridge, table and chairs all condensed into a much smaller space. Our house feels more like a NYC apartment than ever, but it is functional and kind of cozy. Once the belongings were moved, I hung up a plastic sheet between the newly condensed space and where the wreckage was about to take place. I expected dust to travel into the main space, but, to my surprise, it really remained well contained.

Swingin Sledge

trim removed

There is a strange therapeutic value that comes from smashing drywall with a 5-pound sledgehammer. I can't explain it. For attacking the kitchen, I started with the drywall inside the kitchen, removing the drywall from floor to ceiling from the secondary wall separating the kitchen from the main living space. This allowed me to control the dust and waste from getting into the main house. I also removed the drywall that had been behind the gross cabinets along one of the outer walls. Once that waste was contained and removed, we could consider the other side of the wall. 

For the other side of the wall, I used the hammer sparingly, sending the debris towards the kitchen when I used it. Once I had an opening near a post, I used a wrecking bar to pry the sheets loose instead of just smashing. This method considerably reduced the amount of dust produced. Unlike the kitchen-side, this side of the wall had a coved transition from wall to ceiling. We are not sure if we want one uniform ceiling without a transition from main-living to kitchen or not. Once the cove is gone, it's gone, so we decided to remove the drywall up to the top of the door frame, delaying the decision. We are leaning towards mirroring the opening the owners did in the 1960's when they opened up the wall between the living area and the original 2nd bedroom. They left the cove and cut a straight line less than a foot from the ceiling. One advantage to having the cove, beyond aesthetics, is that we can run wiring on the kitchen side without having the get into more drywall or run them through the attic or crawlspace. Leaving these decisions for another day, I packed the waste drywall away and turned to consider the framing.

Framing

wall gone

With about of foot of drywall still attached at the top, I could not just remove the framing. Instead, I cut it off a couple of inches below the bottom edge of the drywall, and removed the framing one at a time. The end result is an opening over 3 meters across. The base plate still needs to be removed, and we need to decide what to do about the ceiling, but the impact of the opening is substantial. After these pictures were taken, I removed the post on the left-side in that first picture. I also cleaned up all the raggedy-jaggedy drywall at the ends, cleaning up the final opening.

Our next steps include solving for the floor in the kitchen, including cutting in a trap door. Then, we will make a decision about the furnace. We are considering an electric furnace that can be adapted to handle a heat pump / air conditioning system later. This also takes us another step away from non-renewable energy sources, which will only become more expensive, but an all-electric furnace is definitely more expensive on a month-to-month basis.

That's it for today. Thanks, as always, for following along-