On tearing down walls and creating a beautiful space for community.

You guys, it’s done.

To be honest, I feel like I did after birthing a baby. It was a long six weeks of labor, stress, chaos, disruption, adjustment, flexibility. Living out of our cars and moving from house to house. I knew it would be worth it in the long run, but during the process it felt like it was never going to end.

I’ve been thinking about what this renovation means. There’s a lot of significance to what we’ve done, and I started to write something all deep and meaningful, but then realized, really I just want to show you pictures.

Here’s where we started…

Here’s our kitchen now…

In terms of significance, this project has a lot.

We even hid a letter in the floor under the island, a message to whomever owns this house in the future. (Chris gets the credit for this idea.)

There’s all sorts of meaning that I could connect to this renovation, but bottom line is, we just wanted to create a space of openness where people could gather.

So we tore down the walls.

(Of course, first we drew all over them.)

Before, when we had parties, even though we had three distinct rooms, everyone always would end up gathered in the kitchen.

So it made sense to open it up.

I’ve always loved the open concept, where the furniture and decor – not walls – distinguished the different living spaces. So that is what we tried to create.

The world has come a long way since 1994 in terms of usable kitchen storage, so now, although we knocked out a pantry, we have three times the amount of space, and even better, it’s all usable.

No more unreachable cabinets. No more teetering towers of cast iron pans. Spice drawers? Oh yeah. Electronics charging drawer? Yup. Rollouts and full extension drawers? Uh huh. And counter space for days.