Delayed Demolition

November 19th, 2007 by Connie | Filed under Rehab.

A Little Demolition Goes a Long Way

Floorplan: Before

And After:

A few days back, I took my friend Marc over to see our latest project. Not only is he a great guy, he’s also looking for a place to rent and we’ve been trying to wrangle him into one of ours for a while. He’s also blunt– a valuable trait in a friend.

While I was busy pointing out the new utility room, siding, windows, fixtures and other neat-o stuff, Marc was busy turning in circles, staring blankly around the room and obviously not paying a bit of attention to my witty repartee. I’ve seen this look on his face before. As Mr. Free says, ‘the gears were turning.’

“I’d knock this out… it’s totally useless. Then someone might actually be able to arrange their furniture.”

Oops…

‘This’ is a little half-wall partition, jutting out about three feet into the living room. Its ugly. Every visit to the house, someone would grab a pole, give it a shake and say, “we’ve got to do something about this.” But nothing was done– and ‘this’ kept slipping through the editing process.

As soon as Marc spoke, I saw the invisible couches, chairs, and tables he was so busy arranging in his head and he was absolutely right. With ‘this’ removed, the kitchen pantry lined up perfectly with the living room wall, giving the combination living/dining room a nice, rectangular shape.

It took Mr. Brz about 10 minutes to remove ‘this”… major improvement for such a small amount of effort. And a reminder that furniture arrangement is important to tenants.

From now on, we’re inviting Marc over before getting started

Yanking down the decorative thingies

Half-wall is down and, fortunately, it looks like this partition was an after-thought

You can see that the pantry and living room wall line up perfectly– and that the pantry was finished out all the way to the floor. Mr. Brz’s pulling nails with his favorite tool.