Operation Remove Load Bearing Wall

So now we're back in the downstairs, the main living area of the house.  If you need a reminder the downstairs was originally cut in half with a wall that had a narrow opening between the family room and formal dining and living room, essentially cutting off the back of the house from the front.

Mark and I are fans of an open floor plan so we decided to demo the wall!

 



Goodbye wall!  But as you can see we still had the framing holding everything in place...and we needed to take that down and replace the original support beam with a much longer one!

Ben Fowler gets a HUGE shout out in this post for all his help!!!

First, Mark and Ben had to make two  temporary walls, one on each side of the original wall so that everything would stay in place when they took out the support beam!

Hello temporary wall framing!

Oh somewhere in all of this Becca and I got to play with power tools! (P.S. Hope you like my Tory Burch "safety goggles")

 



So once the temporary framing was up...Mark and Ben removed the original framing...

 

After the original framing was out, down came the support beam that essentially keeps our master bedroom from being in the dining room...(I held my breath when they did this part...it was the true test of the two temporary wall frames...and Ben's AMAZING construction and engineering skills)

 

 

 

 

We didn't want the temporary framing to do all the work for too long, so Mark and Ben immediately put up the new support beam!

 

 

TADA!!!  Then they removed the temporary framing and we had a nice big OPEN space, YAY!

 

 

Mark and I decided to keep a little bit of wall on each side to keep all the electrical units in. 

 

So now the framing was gone and it was time to put up the drywall (HEAVIEST stuff ever)!!!

 

 

 

Not really sure why it's green, but that will be primed, mudded, and painted! 

 

So there you have it, Operation Remove Load Bearing Wall is COMPLETE!!!  Now we have a spacious open living area, hooray!!!

 

 

As a special treat for reading this entire post, I leave you with a picture of Ben at my parents house wearing some of Mark's clothing because he got soaked in a thunder storm...

 



 

:-)

 

Until next time!