Renovation Planning, DL Style ⇒
Us DLs never do anything halfway...our motto is "Go Big or Go Home", and our planning for our first reno in our house was no different.
Let me try to describe the house layout so you will understand what our plans are. We have a typical basement entry home from 1983 so if you come up the stairs and turn left, the kitchen is on your right through an opening, the dining room is in front of you and the living room is on the left of the dining room. There is a half wall between the living room and dining room and a corner gas fireplace in the living room in the corner next to the dining room. Got a picture in your head? Great.
We have wanted hardwood floors in the dining room for quite some time (if we hadn't moved we would have done it in our previous plaace), so we wanted to get going on that in our new place. Our initial plan was simple (as they usually are), lay down hardwood in the dining room and hallway and be done with it. Then we got to thinking, if we took down 1/2 of the 1/2 wall, that would really open up the space. Then our neighbour, who is a builder, suggested we take out the fireplace and the entire separating wall. That would really open up the space and create an amazing open space. That however opened up a whole can of worms.
I neglected to mention that we have a textured ceiling. If we took down that wall and the corner fireplace (with its floor to ceiling brick facade), then we would have to deal with the ceiling. There are 4 ways to deal with a textured ceiling that needs refinishing/fixing:
- do the repairs then attempt to match the existing texture
- scrape the texture off, do the repairs, re-texture the whole ceiling
- scrape the texture off, do the repairs, then mud the whole ceiling to make it smooth
- do the repairs then drywall over the entire ceiling
After about 6 visits from various contractors and a ton of discussions with just about everyone we knew, we decided to do option 4. We discarded 1) because everyone said it doesn't really work, 2) because texture is hard to work around in the future and recessed lighting looks best with a smooth surface and 3) because it was more expensive than option 4).
And once we had decided to create a new ceiling, it made sense to do the recessed lighting first (as we have an electrician coming in to do some other work anyway). So off to Home Depot to figure out which lights we wanted.
All this time we had assumed that the dividing wall was NOT a load bearing wall. However, after talking about it with my dad and going into the attic twice (once to take pictures and once to review after our discussion), I am now convinced it is a load bearing wall. Sigh. This, of course, changes the whole reno schedule.
The good news is that if we can properly brace an LVL Beam, we should be able to take out that wall. However, this is not something we want to do right now and we will have to get an engineer in to figure everything out. This means we have decided to go back to our original plan and just get the dining room and hallway done until we can come up with a plan to remove the wall.
That is how us DLs plan renos.