Open Floor Plans

I sit here in the drywall dust, perched on a barstool, with my computer on a different writing surface this morning, the teak table that used to be on our front porch in Florida.  Is this a metaphor?  Perhaps, but it's also my situation.  I mention the drywall dust because I thought this stage of the drywall install would not generate so much dust.  We haven't gotten to the second part, the mudding and the sanding and more sanding.

It takes a lot to make a wall--did Robert Frost say something similar?  If so, he was talking about some picturesque wall made of stones that had been standing for a century or more.  Once, most people would never have a reason to be so intimately acquainted with drywall dust.

I hold home remodeling shows on TV responsible.  People come in to a perfectly good house and demand an "open concept," which means walls must come down and/or be moved.  I hope to never do this again.  We had an open concept house, but not in the ways that most people mean.  At one point, we had so few interior walls, you could see all the way through our house, from kitchen to bathroom to bedroom.

At least we know the house has good bones.  Another thing about the remodel shows that amuses me--all these flippers buying houses and then being surprised at the old electrical and plumbing infrastructure that must be replaced, all this moaning about how much more it would cost.  Don't tear down walls and you won't make these unpleasant discoveries!

Because of the vaulted ceiling, parts of our house have walls that are so high that we need 3 sheets of drywall.  There are many reasons why we hired a drywall team to do some of the work, and that's one of them.  I'd like to find a team to do the mudding and the sanding, in the hopes that it could be done in a week or less, but those kinds of crews might be harder to find.  We can do the mudding and sanding ourselves, but I wasn't confident in our ability to hoist drywall over our heads and attach it to studs.

I spent some time last night trying to find a camera angle that would capture the progress that's been made, but finally I decided to use my spouse's:

This picture will give you a sense of how the house looked before:

And here's an even older picture, of the paneling which we took down, in favor of the drywall:

We decided to leave the landing, which we're calling the pulpit, for many reasons.  It's not in the way, and it gives us options later.  At some point, we may need to put a staircase back in, when we're elderly and can't climb up that loft ladder.   We're keeping our future floor plans open.