The first non-destructive thing we did was to build a header from the wall that separates the kitchen from the great room. This serves to further delineate the two spaces. I like an open plan design, but not completely open plan. So I thought this separation was necessary. It is a bit blurry, but in the picture on the right you can see the lazer lever used to make sure it was straight.

Kitchen Wall Extension

We also decided to fill in the plant shelves. There was a long plant shelf on the main wall in the great room, and a smaller one adjacent to it. The long one wasn’t centered, so it looked a bit odd, I felt. Also, I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, so that was the main reason to fill them in. The picture below shows the framing.

Main wall on left and the adjacent shorter one on the right.

These were the only two pics I could find of this work, so clearly I wasn’t going overboard with picture taking (yet). Unfortunately, my framing for the smaller plant shelf was for nought. The wall upon which is sat was very poorly framed. It’s not especially noticeable in the above picture, but it had a severe lean. So much so, that I was not comfortable leaving it that way. Since that wall was load bearing, I couldn’t just shift it, so pulled out my plant shelf framing and built a “sister” wall beside it.

Sister Wall

The picture on the right, although dark, shows how far away the top of the sister wall is from the original top of the original. They are touching at the bottom. That’s way out of plumb, and hence my desire to correct it.

The master bath was going to be reconfigured. Part of that required dismantling the toilet enclosure (room) to make more space. The toilet would be moved to a somewhat private area tucked around the corner of a new wall, but with no door.

New toilet location in Master

We decided to do the kitchen ceiling with tongue and groove (T&G). To support this we needed to run straight 2x4s from one end to the other, as shown below.

Framing for T&G Ceiling in Kitchen

This required that I pull down the existing ceiling board and all the blown insulation that was sitting on top of it. That was a big clean-up job. I had 15 green garbage bags piled at the end of my driveway when I was done with it.