House: Taking Out Inside Wall (95% done)

I had some family over during Christmas and my small house there isn't a lot of room. I decided to change that. I have been thinking for a while but wasn't sure. Then after Christmas I decided to finally make the change. You did have the dinning room/kitchen area and then a wall and then the living room. It's not the best for guest. because you would have 2 groups or crammed in one area. That wasn't good enough for me. So I decided to take our half a wall between the dinning room and living room. I didn't want to take it completely out because I still wanted a slight difference, but still have people feel together.

The wall before from the living room

Wall before from dinning room

I took out one side slowly slowly so I could see if their was any wires or anything behind the wall. I knew about the electrical plug midway but wasn't sure how it was ran.

Started to take out the other side

Took out all the dry wall

After Step 1

Then I took the door off and you can really see it open up more

As I was taking out the studs each by each double checkingt o make sure it wasn't a load bearing, which I looked up in the attic and double checked and didn't seem like it was, but still need to be safe. I was going to come down to the chair rail but I noticed that may be to low. I decided to go up a little higher so you dont see the back of the fireplace and if I ever wanted to put a couch or anything over there you wouldn't see the back of the couch. I would rather see a little higher wall then the back of a couch. It just doesn't look right if it is higher.

Now you can get the idea of the open space now. I still need to work on the little things to finish up but the big stuff is out of the way.

I added a 1x8 on top to give it a nice size to put things on. I was going to go with a 1x6 but didn't seem to be wide enough.

Filled in the side wall and had to keep going over since the walls from the different rooms weren't the same depth. The dinning room wall stuck out about 3/16th of a inch farther which doesn't sound like much but it is
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