Reinvented… Rewind Wednesday!

We’ve been renovating our little working-man’s bungalow for close to 2 years now… and if you’ve been following along you’ll know that this summer we took our activities outside! And we’ve been working hard!! That’s what makes Rewind Wednesday’s so perfect… I can keep up with blogging AND work on the house…

… AND share some of my favourite posts long lost in our archives.

How terrific is that?!

If you’d like to re-play one of your archived posts, too… if you’d like to get out in the sun or tackle that project that’s been waiting for you to find free time… Rewind with us!! You’ll find all the info you need at the end of this post.

The post I’m sharing with you today IS special to me… not only because it showcases the REINVENTION of our Dining Room & Living Room doorway (the one renovation project that my husband and I are MOST proud of)… but because one of my favourite bloggers – Paul from the blog Kitchen and Residential Design – loved our work, wrote about it on his blog and compared the approach we’ve taken in our renovation work to the philosophy of Sarah Susanka and Mark Vassallo’s new book Not So Big Remodeling: Tailoring Your Home for the Way You Really Live. I was thrilled!! Not only that… the post Paul wrote was picked up and published in the Naperville Sun (serving the Chicago suburbs)!! WOW!

I hope you enjoy our work as much as Paul did! :-)

 Transformation!

I love our little house… I’ve always loved it even when it wasn’t as cute as it is now :-) From the moment we moved in, though, we’ve been living in mayhem… yep, we’ve been remodelling! Readers can find evidence of our self-inflicted life of chaos in both my fireplace post and my bedroom metamorphosis.

So what remodel am I sharing with you on this lovely Monday? Hang tight!! First a little explanation… then photos!

Take a look at this thumbnail of our floor plan – keep in mind that it’s not to scale and it’s only showing the centre of the house. The pale lines represent where walls existed but have since been removed. The pale rectangles represent the original doorways that have been changed. All thicker, black lines are walls & doors as they are now.

Hopefully this floor plan allows you to see that the centre of the house was originally a boxed in “hallway” entered from each room through an actual door. The front room now designated “dining room” was originally a bedroom.

Okay… we wanted to open things up!!! We couldn’t go open-concept without some major expense so we did the next best thing…

We created a wonderful archway that links the living room, dining room and kitchen!!

This is the only Before photo I have – but it shows you how we removed the wall between the kitchen and the hallway to open things up – and you can see the two doorways, one into the front bedroom and the other into the living room.

Now let’s look at some of that mayhem I spoke about!!

In this photo you’re looking from the living room through to the bedroom door. We’ve removed the door frames and we’re getting ready to remove a section of the wall… Brian’s golf clubs will have to find a new home!

When we remodelled all the rooms, we replaced the plaster & lath with drywall… not so with the living room. Because the p&l is brittle and almost as hard as cement, Brian used his circular saw to create a cut line that would protect the p&l that we would NOT be removing. The section that we removed came off without too much stress and only a little damage to the walls.

The photo to the left shows you the new framed-out archway into the soon-to-be dining room. The old wall you see?? Soon to be torn out and replaced with a wall level with the new upright stud next to my pup Simon’s hip.

I love how the new archway brought the natural light into the kitchen! (pic to the right)

Here’s the archway all drywalled – again, the view is from the kitchen.

Now how sad would it be to build simple, squared out archways in a 1939 bungalow? I always think it’s a shame when people update older homes and end up taking away original character. Okay… a little truth here… our working-man’s house didn’t have a whole lot of original character. The living room, though, had these great coved ceilings. Here, take a look… but ignore the ugly wall colour in the living room!!

I LOVE this curve and knew that I wanted to re-create this in the archway corners. I’d seen what I wanted in other older homes so I knew it would be perfect for our house.

Here’s a photo of the forms that Brian built and adhered into the corners.

There’s very little in our remodel that we haven’t done ourselves… but I can tell you we weren’t about to take on the task of fixing the crumbling plaster you can see in this photo. Also, the whole living room needed a good skim coat of plaster to smooth out the walls and cover the cracks that come with age AND some fool had popcorned the ceiling that HAD to be removed! So we hired a plaster-guy… he did those things AND plastered Brian’s forms.

Looks pretty good, hey?! But these walls needed colour!!

Now for the BIG reveal pics!! :-)

Viewing out from the Dining Room to the Kitchen and Living Room (sorry for the renovation mess!)

Looking at the archways from the Living Room (yikes! more reno mess!)

A closer look at the archway corners and the coved ceiling in the Living Room. Perfect!

Looking through our wonderful archway into the Dining Room

I hope you’ve all like the transformation of the archways linking my kitchen, dining room and living room… we love it!! You even got a sneak peak of my kitchen transformation!!

Now it’s you’re turn!!

If you’d like to re-wind with us… you know, be lazy and enjoy a lovely summer day OUTSIDE instead of in front of your computer pulling together a Wednesday blog post… just…

…re-publish your post to the top of your blog. Then…

Copy and paste the Rewind Wednesday button to your post. That way your visitors will know that you’re participating in DesignTies’ Rewind Wednesday blog party!

Please link back to the host blog, DesignTies, and encourage your readers to come visit us for a list of other Rewind Wednesday blog party participants.

If you’re participating in Rewind Wednesday please be sure to add your permalink (NOT your general blog address) in Mister Linky below. The permalink is the URL of your post. Simply copy and paste.

Go visit the other bloggers participating in Rewind Wednesday!!

Mister Linky

The following blogs are participating in our Rewind Wednesday blog party…