The First Big Decision
When we first toured our house, I knew that we would love living there. However, one thing that drove me nuts from the first moment was the half wall in our living room. Sure, it's practical. It had electrical so you could plug in lights or maybe a cell phone charge, provides easy storage for sweatshirts and bags, or even just a place to put unwanted mail. But see, that's the thing, I didn't want it nor did I want the clutter. Needless to say, it had to go, and that was our first big project: taking it down.
After a few days of owning the house, I decided it had to be removed. Seriously, how hard could taking a half wall down be? Well we realized as four people ran full speed at the wall to take it down that maybe it was harder than we thought. Combine this with electrical that . needed to be tied off and we were in for a rough ride.
You might wonder why we hadn't thought of these things yet, but remember this was our first project in our house. Mid way through trying to push the wall over, we realized we were not going to have flooring underneath the, the electrical needed to be turned off, and we were going to end up with a giant hole in our wall that needed to be patched. And that's how we ended up with four people pushing and running into the wall trying to take it down, and my husband and his friend yelling stop as they realized the electrical was going to be a bigger problem than we thought.
Fortunately, my husband and his best friend know a thing or two about electrical, and they were able to mitigate it. They went down to our basement, cut the wiring, and after researching the local codes, they were able to utilize a junction box and some extra wiring to connect the wires between the walls. Okay, so maybe I am exaggerating this a bit because we actually didn't have power in that room for a day or two until they figured it out, but the end result is what matters!
After a lot of pushing, shoving, and running, it was down. With a gaping hole in the floor, we realized the carpet had to come up as well. So yes, we also tore those out because why not? Here is a photo of how it looked after.
So by Day 7 of owning the house, we didn't have floors in part of the house, there was a giant hole in both walls from where the wall was, and we had managed to fix an electrical problem. Not bad for a few days work. At this point, we might as well have started a HGTV show because this was the easiest of the problems we tackled...if only we knew what was ahead.
Fortunately, we had a great support system. My parents and my in-laws were there to help us when they could. My mom in this case came to the rescue with the hole in the wall. She showed us how to repair dry wall and mud and tape the wall to fix the hole. And the end result turned out beautifully. But first, we had to do the floors which turned out to be a lot more challenging than any of us thought.