Kitchen + Living Room [Slow] Progress

The past few months have been crazy for Brice and I. Brice is in his busiest months of the year with his lawncare business while balancing working full time at the hospital. I've finished up the school year and completing my masters degree, while prepping for our biggest market we've done with etre. All great things to be thankful for, but all of them piled up. Which means that there was extremely little room left to work on our house so we've been in a bit of a lull.

To give a backstory on the kitchen:

As you'll see if the before photos, there's a wall dividing the family room and smaller living room. There's a larger family room on the opposite side of the house by the back deck, which is more formal. The smaller living room off the kitchen is where we would "hang out" the most just Brice and I. It's right by the hallway leading to all the bedrooms, so it's a high traffic area. 

Our goal is to open up the kitchen and small living room by knocking out the wall and moving the kitchen out farther to make it a bit bigger. We had a weekend we had free, and both our parents were free, too. They came out and helped demo alllllll of it. What started out as, "Oh, maybe we'll just tear out the carpet and pull the trim off the walls.." quickly turned into, "While we're all here, why don't we just bust through this wall and rip out all the ceiling lights and fans, too?"

BEFORE PHOTOS

kitchen + dining

small living room right off the kitchen

PROGRESS PHOTOS

..yikes! We tore up all the carpet but the tile proved to be more of a challenge. It took us a few nights, but we knocked it out! Definitely a less enjoyable project.

That wall that we wanted to take out is a supporting wall so before we could officially knock it all down, we have to put up a support beam. We needed Brice's dad's help with this one, so the kitchen project was at a standstill for awhile until we could line up a Saturday where Brice wasn't working at the hospital and Benj was free. 

MORE PROGRESS

The beam is up!!!! This means we can keep progress rolling! We envision having a bar with stools on this side 'dividing' the living room from the kitchen and a big wood exposed beam up above it. This will open it up far more than having a huge wall in between. 

They had to try out its strength. :)

I will say I never realized how much I actually enjoyed cooking until it was incredibly hard to do so. I love coming home and going into the kitchen by myself, turning on an audiobook, podcast, or music, and cooking for Brice and I. I always viewed it as something I had to do anyway, so I might as well find a way to enjoy it. Not having a kitchen has showed me how much I really actually do enjoy it.