Opening Things Up

We finally finished all the demo! We saved demolishing this pass-through wall last to keep the dust and other nasty stuff out of our den for as long as possible. First, we checked that this wall was not a load bearing wall. So let me refresh your memory of our original plan. 

- Remove the column between the window and the pocket door (yes, having a window there defeats the purpose of having a pocket door. Another one of the previous owner/carpenter, Bob's, great ideas)

- Keep the bottom half of the wall because it provides much needed storage on the kitchen side  

- Push the left side of the old window to the left about a foot

- Push the top of it up to match the height of the doorway

- Keep the right side of the wall as is

We're a little over zealous when it comes to demo and we usually end up tearing out more than planned. We had to completely tear out the right side of the wall in order to remove the pocket door. Really that entire wall didn't have much framing at all. At this point we had this convo.

Jon: Hmm, I really like how open it looks. Maybe we shouldn't frame back the right side of the wall.

Me: Let's not make any quick decisions. Let's just stare at it for a week, talk to Phu about what we can do and then decide.

So we stared and stared at the nothingness...

And decided to keep things open and not frame up the right side of the wall again. It makes it feel almost like a great room. We built back up the half wall with the cabinets on the kitchen side and put up a header across the top.

Here's a shot from the kitchen side. The cabinets were previously 12" deep and we built new ones at 16" deep for two reasons. (1) the old 12" deep cabinets were too shallow for lower cabinets and didn't provide enough storage (2) I asked Phu to build a little desk on the far right end so we'd have a dedicated space to pay bills, sort mail, keep cookbooks, etc. Twelve inches for a desk wouldn't have been deep enough for my laptop and writing space.