The Steen Style

It feels like forever since I’ve been talking about, thinking about or planning for the demolition of our dining room wall that separates that room from our living room. Technically, it has been 19 months and 20 days (since that’s how long we’ve lived in this house) but it feels like forever.

Last month I talked about what I didn’t like in this room. You can see a bunch of examples written on the photo but the main problem was the wall and the fact that it blocked so much natural light from our living room. I was more than ready to see it go!

When we walked into our house tonight, this is what we saw! To simply say, “I was excited,” is a complete understatement. I’m not sure how I can express it to you. I screamed, I got really giddy and was jumping all around…maybe those images help define how I was feeling after work today?

The light!! Sweet, sweet natural light. It already makes everything seem so much bigger and better even though we still have a long way to go here. We couldn’t get rid of the whole wall, the ceilings are lower in the dining room than in the hallways so we needed to leave support, but it still makes such a huge difference!

Here is another picture of the room before today. I am standing in the corner, next to the window and looking toward the living room/kitchen/entryway…

Here is the room, from the same angle, today! You can see the living room, entryway and the openings to the kitchen. I am obsessed and ready for the rest of the demo to be complete. That plastic isn’t the best look for our house, it kind of stresses me out to see it, so lets move on.

I’m standing in the doorway from the kitchen to the living room in this picture. The front of the house gets so much more light than the back and we just knew that opening up that wall would help lighten up this room that seems constantly dark.

SO MUCH BETTER!! Seriously. I don’t think I could even imagine how much this would change-up our house and how much I would love it like this. Even with the mud and sheet rock that has yet to be textured and painted, it still looks so much better than before.

Here is a before and after comparison that I have condensed into one picture (I love the iPhone apps that do this!). It is just crazy to me how much I already love this new look! We still have a way to go – demo on the floors, new wood floors installed, casings on the openings of the walls, crown molding and then new paint on almost everything. Luckily the work is being done for us (except for paint – hard to hire that out when it is easy enough to do ourselves) so this process is a lot more fun when done as a spectator!

Demo on the floors starts tomorrow – I can’t wait to see the progress!