Saturday morning I took Heidi to the store to buy a gift for a Birthday party and when I got home my dining room wall was gone!  And I didn’t have to do any of it :). We sold our beautiful chandelier on Craigslist and the lady came to get it in between photos.  Our new design is more casual.

Here’s the other side of the room and the back side of the pantry.  With Darren making such fast work of the drywall (He made it look so easy!) I started taking down the popcorn textured ceiling.

The entire family helped.  And it was a BIG help to have many hands taking trips to the dumpster.  By evening, Dub said, “I’m tired of taking shamrock to the dumpster.”

“You mean Sheetrock?”

“Whatever.”  It still makes me giggle.

Darren wrestled down our old range hood. Whew, we thought we’d never get that down. And unfortunately the back side of that wall holds the gas line to the upstairs heater.   It will be an extra expense to move it out of the way so we can open the room up.  You never know what you will find inside walls.

Behind the range hood was this strip of wallpaper original to when the house was built in 1971.  It almost looks like grass cloth.

I listed the old cabinets on Craigslist for $100 and had a ready buyer within the hour.  They drove out and took everything apart and hauled it away.  Whoop! (except for the desk and island which really isn’t reusable anyway.  We still are mustering up the energy to remove that stuff and for now the sink is still handy.)

Caleb carried all our books to the basement and then Darren and I hauled the bookcases down for the kid’s to organize.

This wall is leaving too.  We plan to paint all that brick a nice light color and wrap it all the way around the backside into the dining room too.  If I don’t like the house THIS open, I plan to buy a couple of IKEA bookcases and put them back to back so one side faces the dining room and the other side the family room then put in crown molding and trims so they looks built in.  Our Ikea won’t open until October 2014, so I have some time to think about it.

In the midst of this we moved all our pantry food to the garage and our dishes to the attic kitchen.  I’ll show you that later this week.  We’ve found it’s not too handy to have our food and cooking space 2 floors apart.  So we bought a mini fridge for upstairs and are gradually carrying our most used items up.

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Now the pantry can come down too.

Whew time to take a break.

And pay the kids in popsicles for all their help.

I spent today on the attic bed working on menus and reading books.  I guess all that work wiped me out more than I thought.  It sure felt good not to run kids to school and all around town for their activities.  Summer is the BEST.