Adobe Wall Take Down

We are knee deep in our kitchen renovation and this wall is about to be history! Or maybe I should say that it IS history literally over 100 years old made out of adobe “rock” solid pun intended haha

This has always been an odd layout having a bedroom right off the kitchen so one of the first things we did was take off the door and use this room as an office/boutique room for my clothing boutique. As I started thinking bigger and planning out what we need to do with our kitchen I realized we could at least double the doorway and transform the room/office into an actual dining room!

I’ve so many different opinions on whether it is a load bearing wall or not and got a quote of $7200 to remove the wall and put in a beam. Well, you know I’m willing to put in the work if we can and instead of just forking out that kind of money we needed a definite YES or NO if it’s a load bearing wall!

Here’s Dallin in his natural DIY habitat just knocking ceilings and stuff haha

We needed to open up the ceiling along the wall to see if the upstairs floor joists are resting on the wall and guess what?……THEY DON”T!

This gap shows that the top floor isn’t resting on the adobe for support which means we are good to DESTROY!

This is the ceiling opened up on the other side of the wall from the office perspective!

Did I mention that our walls are all 14” thick? This is NO easy project and on top of it I don’t get to join in on any of the fun because I’m 8 months pregnant (I know great timing for demo, right?).

SO. MUCH. DIRT. I mean the wall IS dirt so I guess that would make sense that there’s a dirt pile right off the bat but holy moly! Dallin Taped off the doorway so dirt won’t make its way upstairs and everywhere else but it’s honestly kind of inevitable and I’ve just come to terms with living in dirt for the next little while.

Apparently 1 square foot of adobe weighs like 100lbs or something and is flippin heavy! This is where the progress is so far and next step is bringing in reinforcements. My father-in-law wants to come be in on the fun which is fine by me because I really want this wall out before this baby comes and it’s not looking like a one man job!

One of the first projects we did when we moved in was replace the flooring downstairs. Well I miiiiight not be in love with it anymore and learned a lot from my choices and what I would have done differently. Once this wall is out there just won’t be flooring along that whole stretch and would be kind of a pickle to try and make look seamless so we’re calling it a learning experience and will re-do all the flooring again. I know. Are you crying for me because I’m crying for me haha

Here’s my inspo board for the dining room:

* Pic is from Pinterest

I’d like to have a long built in bench along the wall with a long wooden table and chairs surrounding it! I’m so excited to have it all open right off the kitchen to be able to cook and have somewhere for company in the same space!

I found these chairs on Facebook Marketplace that I just had to jump on since they have some neat character and were only $75 for 6 chairs!

I’ll keep updating as we go and might make this into several parts but I’m so excited for the progress!

Thanks for being here!

xoxo