Surprises!

Here are a few updated pictures of the house.  It  has been stripped down to the bare bones and, as you can imagine, we encountered a few surprises along the way...

Here I am sporting a dust mask on the second floor.  I can't take credit for any of this work, but I did provide energy in the form of donuts! Directly behind me is one of the load-bearing walls.  When we exposed this wall, and several others just like it, we soon realized that our original plans and drawings were not going to work. Surprise.

Luckily, Sam has since come up with another layout for the second floor that looks like it will be even better than the first.

On the first floor, though, we really wanted an open floorplan. So, we were slightly upset to unveil load-bearing walls that would divide the kitchen and dining room.  Rather than work around them, like we will upstairs, we will demolish them. It's going to take a lot of extra labor, an engineer, and, of course, more $$$$!  I think it will definately be worth it to open up the space. 

Here is a photo that shows one of those walls on the first floor but also, another surprise, a fireplace in the kitchen.

As much as I would love to have a fireplace or even a brick oven in my kitchen, even I can see how impractical and expensive that would be!

Here was a happy surprise...

After the ceilings came down, we found vaulted ceilings in three of the bedroom areas.  It will feel so much bigger in those rooms and the spaces will be way more interesting. If you look at the center of the photo above, through the hole in the wall... yep, that would be our neighbor's house. 

And finally, this is part of the third floor space that we plan on making our master bedroom.  The hole in the center is where the staircase now ascends.  Those are just electrical wires hanging from the ceiling now, but we found evidence of gas lighting in the house as well.  

Fun Fact: One of the first places gas lighting was sucessfully used in the United States was at Rembrant Peale's Museum In Baltimore, in 1816.  And, Baltimore was actually the first American city with gas streetlights.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_lighting 

Berlin is currently the city with the largest existing gas lighting network of about 44,000 lamps. Here's Sam and I in Berlin.  If this wall can come down overnight, how difficult can ours be?