Before we started this project, we preferred houses with rooms to divide spaces, as opposed to the open floor plan that HGTV tells me every home-buyer wants. I like being able to bake banana bread in the kitchen while listening to Miranda Lambert, not fighting to tune out the sound of South Park coming from the living room.
But when we started planning the downtown luxury slum, we decided that we could dedicate half of the house to private space and half of the house to open concept public space. The open concept half will allow for passage straight from the front porch though the living room to the kitchen and then out to the back deck. This half of the house will provide the perfect entertaining space for hosting Thanksgiving every 10 years.
The bedrooms and bathrooms would be the private space side of the house, providing the opportunity to escape college football night to read or escape a This Is Us marathon to play video games and eat Cheetos, the inferior crunchy cheese snack.
So the renovations during week 3 focused on achieving this open feel and providing the natural light I desperately crave. What do you think?
Honestly this was a bit of a surprise.
The roof:
When they leveled the floor and ceiling on the front half of the house, the original front hipped metal roof ended up pulling away from the rear flat rubber roof. The contractor estimated the cost to repair it in addition to leveling the very back of the roof and replacing pretty much all of the ceiling supports that had been previously burned in a fire would cost just as much as replacing the entire back half of the roof structure.
I didn’t expect the roof to actually come down until we had a signed contract to change the plan, but the next day, it was done.
The back wall:
The very back of the house was actually a porch that had been enclosed and turned into indoor living space. If you can imagine a typical porch, it was about 4-5 feet deep, with a sloped ceiling that dropped from approximately 8 feet down to about 6.5 feet at the very back. The rest of the back of the house had almost 9 foot ceilings, so we were planning to raise the ceilings in the porch section to line up with the 9 foot ceilings. Because of this, we knew that the back wall would need to be completely rebuilt in order to be structurally sound. But somehow I expected the original siding to be carefully pulled off so we could reuse it on the new well. When we got to the house the next day, they had completely knocked down the back wall. They saved the windows and appear to have saved some of the siding. My guess is that any siding that they didn’t keep was just as damaged as most of the rotten, termite excavated, and heavily charred wood throughout the house, though we have been lucky to find most of the siding in really good condition.
Also this week:
PS. Choose Hawkins Cheezies.
Downtown Luxury Slum 
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