Demo

Once the house was officially ours, we were ready to get started working!  Let me make it clear that we did not live in the house at the time!  We still had our house in West Columbia on the market, and the timing actually worked out to be quite perfect!  We began work on the house in September, and moved in on May 19th.  It was our 3rd wedding anniversary and we moved into our 3rd home!

The very first thing to be done was to open things up a bit.  Ben and I both really like an open floor plan, and if you know anything about old houses, it's not usually the case!  The room we call our kitchen now, was originally 3 separate rooms.  A small kitchen, a separate dining room, and the sunroom.  All 3 were divided by walls.  Here:

The room with the fireplace was the dining room.  On the opposite side of the fireplace wall was the kitchen.  You can see the sunroom through the glass french doors.  We wanted to take both of these walls down to open it all up!  I loved the doors, so they were reused in a different spot in the house!

Standing in the kitchen looking toward the sunroom.  

This is looking the other direction in the kitchen toward the laundry room.

Sunroom!

Another view of the sunroom.  We love having this side door.  It's like the "family door."  Everyone who knows us well always comes to this door.  If someone knocks on the front door, we know it's someone we don't know!

This is taken with me standing in the sunroom looking into the dining room.  Both of the walls you see came down.

Ben was especially excited for the "demo" phase because he basically got to go crazy with a sledge hammer.  He called some friends, and they got the job done!

Hardworking hubby!  We quickly learned how old houses were built!  See the skinny, horizontal wood paneling on the walls?  That was behind the sheet rock on every single wall!   This was a sturdy house!!

See how open it is now?! I should mention that the large square step down in the middle of the floor is where the fireplace/chimney was.  My dad climbed to the top and knocked each brick down.  Man was he a mess!!

Here I'm standing in the kitchen looking into my new dining room space.  Those old studs were next to come down to open up the hallway.