Kitchen

We had a contractor come in to see if a wall that we wanted to remove in the kitchen was load bearing. He spent awhile checking out everything he could, upstairs and down and everywhere in between. Then he announced that he had no idea if the wall was a support wall and suggested we take down some of the sheet-rock to have a better idea. And so one day we decided a little bit of demo to answer this all important question was not such a bad idea. After all, how can Kara start to plan our renovations without this all important knowledge? Can we safely remove the menacing wall without the roof falling in? Good info. to have.

And so we took down the sheet-rock in, what we thought, would be the least obvious place. Above the cabinets. The problem was, we ran into two very large pieces of sheet-metal which appeared to be functioning as cold air return vents. All of our efforts brought us no closer to an answer. Sooooo....

We moved all of the plates, etc. out of the cabinets and stacked it all on the dining room table. Then we proceeded to take down that wall of upper cabinets.





After the cabinets were down, the sheet-rock was next.










Now SURELY we will have an answer! And we called the contractor once again. He showed up with an electrician, a plumber and a couple other important looking guys and they all surveyed the situation and none of them would commit to the declaration of "non-load-bearing". They did, however, size up all of our other requests so as to give us bids on various other to do projects.

Ron delivers mail to an engineering firm. So one day he asked them if we could hire them to declare if our wall was load bearing or not. This firm only does commercial projects and told Ron there was no engineering firm in town that did residential. He did know some Architects, however, who were in desperate need of ANY work and gave us their names. We have one of those firms coming out to the house soon to give us his expert opinion. (I am now of the believe that no one will actually commit to this, however, and we are probably throwing away our $$) BUT, in the hopes that more demo will help this riddle, Ron proceeded to take off all the cedar siding of the corner post we believe MAY be the load bearing post.














So this is our kitchen remodel to date! We LOVE the nice roomy feeling we have without all those other cabinets! And the 2 x 4 look is sure to catch on!