Hey There, Studs

Our work downstairs was no where near complete, but at some point Cory and I decided to head upstairs and begin opening up the space.  If you recall, there were five bedrooms upstairs when we bought the house.  Our plan is to make two of those bedrooms larger, change the shape of a third, and leave the remaining space open as a hallway and kids' study.  The fourth bedroom for Sasha will be added over the garage during construction and our master will be built as an addition downstairs.  So here is a look at what the upstairs looked like before:

Four bedrooms are off of this hall and one bedroom, the "master", is behind the camera.

The first thing we did was remove the wall between the two front rooms.  This area will become the hallway / kids' study.

We quickly got a glimpse of how the space will look when it is one big space.

Demo is sexy work, man.

It took a couple days to get to this point.  The dividing wall is gone as is most of the flooring and some smaller walls that needed to be removed.  It's amazing how bright and airy the space feels now!

Our plan is to have two large desks that will each seat two children along the walls between the dormers.  I think it's going to be awesome.  If I were a kid, I'd definitely want to do my homework in a space like this.  Well, in a cleaned up and finished space like this, that is.

The next task was removing the large hallway wall.  Cory and I didn't plan to take down this wall because it will become the new back wall of two bedrooms, but the location of the bedroom doors needs to be changed and we need an access into the study area so it just made sense to take it down and start from scratch.

Let me just say, plaster is heavy, messy, dusty, ridiculous stuff.  Yes, you can do cool curves with it and it's very sturdy.  But oh. my. stars.  If I never have to remove plaster again in my life it will be too soon.

Goodbye, plaster wall!  Thankfully, we had a lot of help one Saturday which made the cleanup of all the mess go LOTS faster than Cory and I could have managed on our own.

That help was super important because we had to take the other hallway wall down, too.  You can now see that the back bedrooms picked up quite a bit of space from the hallway - hooray!

The only hiccup we've run into with these two bedrooms is that Tessa will not have a very spacious closet.  The corner where her closet sits has to be cut at an angle in order to have enough room to maneuver at the top of the stairs.  So it will only be a few feet wide.  We thought she was going to have more closet space on the opposing wall, but there just isn't enough room due to the placement of the windows.  I'm kind of bummed because one can never have too much closet space (especially a girl), but we'll make do.

Overall, I'm really happy with how the upstairs is transforming.  There is still much to be done up here, including removing a bit more plaster and getting clean edges along the ceilings.  We've been doing demo for so long and are absolutely exhausted.  It doesn't sound like a big deal to take down some walls and tear out floors, but it is a HUGE amount of work.  So hopefully we'll see some construction start soon!