Walls come tumbling down

“HEEEEERREEE’S TERRRRY!”

Well, it happened, folks: and no, I don’t mean we went to another Halloween party, dressed as characters from The Shining. I mean Terry finally did what he’s been threatening to do since the day we moved into this house, and knocked down the wall between the kitchen and the living room.

This was my kitchen wall at around 6pm on Tuesday evening:

 

(Yes, that’s a “Keep Calm…” print, please don’t judge me. I got it years ago, before everyone and their dog had jumped on the bandwagon, and I didn’t have anything else to put on that wall, so up it went. The annoying thing is that I’ve come to absolutely DETEST the whole “Squee! Cupcakes!” thing, but I DID like the colour, and the kitchen badly needed a shot of colour, so… I’m rambling. I’ll stop.)

This was my kitchen wall a few hours later:

The wall is still level, by the way, it’s just ME that was apparently listing to one side, presumably because of the sheer horror of the situation. Terry looks mighty pleased with himself, though, doesn’t he? That’s ‘cos he got to KNOCK DOWN A WALL, RARR!

And this morning, with a little more light, and a little less rubble. It obviously needs to be finished and the wall painted and re-plastered in sections, before the doors go on. Also, we need to actually BUY the doors before they go on, so there’s that, too.

In Terry’s defence, we had always planned to knock a hole in that wall, and then put in some French doors so we can have it either open or closed, as required. The house is actually designed to work either with or without the hole: it was one of the options when these houses were being built, and naturally the previous owner decided to go for all of the options we WOULDN’T have picked, this one included. There are a few houses on our street which are in the same style as ours, and as far as I can tell (by looking in their windows when it’s dark out and the lights are on, naturally. You may call it “spying”; I call it, er, “research”.) ALL of them have the hole in that wall, with doors leading through to the living room. The house next door to ours has the hole/doors, and we much prefer it to our non-holed layout (we’re big fans of open-plan interiors, and the kitchen is kind of separate from the rest of the house as it is, which is a pain when I need to go and fill up my wine glass, obviously…) so when we bought the house, we bought it with the intention of opening up the bottom level. (Yes, we DID get a builder round, just to confirm that we could take away the wall without the house falling down. We may be stupid, but we’re not THAT stupid…)

We just… didn’t intend on doing it quite so SOON. Or I didn’t, anyway. As you may have gathered from my previous posts on this subject, Terry’s always been pretty big on the whole “knocking down the wall” thing, and I’m fairly sure that’s mostly because, well, it means he gets to smash things. I was less keen, partly because I knew the project would mean living with a whole lot of mess for a while, but also because I’m kind of terrified we’ll hate it, but by then it’ll be too late, because, oh, hai giant hole in the wall.

I was also reluctant to press ahead with The Hole, because I sort of hate our kitchen, and now we’ll have to look at it when we’re in the living room, too. This is the living room:

It’s very empty and magnolia at the moment, and that’s because we’ve done absolutely nothing to it it (Other than removing the “feature” wallpaper from one wall) since we moved in. That will change at some point, but for now the main change is the lovely view it now has of the kitchen:

And, I mean, I don’t HATE the kitchen. That’s far too strong a word. It IS my least-favourite room in the house, though, and the one I would most like to change: it’s much darker than we’d go for ourselves, and, strangely enough, although it’s much larger than our last one in terms of floorspace, there aren’t nearly as many cabinets or work-surfaces, so we want to add some more of those, probably in the shape of an island of some kind. All of this is in the future, however: for now, we have a giant HOLE to deal with…