Tear Down That Wall!
A friend and fellow real estate agent once advised that it’s advantageous for the kitchen to be immediately visible as soon as one steps in the front door. All good, my friend, but there may be walls in the way. Her advice? “Mr. Larson, tear down that wall.”
Our first flip house project was right across the street (this was perfect because I lose or forget tools about 15 times per day.) Immediately upon entering the front door you’d find yourself in a small foyer with the living room to the left and a dining room to the right. The kitchen is behind the dining room… not in view from the front door.
I was about to learn that walls are a social construct meant to be torn down. Now naturally I had some vague awareness of the idea of load-bearing walls and that you couldn’t just go to town with sledgehammers, necessarily. It was time to phone in some help. I was referred to an excellent carpenter named Phil. He knew I was keen to save money so he told me what to do before he got there, which was to grab some sledgehammers and start smashing. Then, he and I could work alongside one another, reducing the number of hours I’d need to pay him. I love this type of arrangement!
Whereas new construction is almost always drywall, this house built in the 40’s has plaster walls. I don’t hate plaster as a building material. It’s durable and long- lasting. No one is going to punch a hole through plaster; it’s going to punch a hole in you, first. Sure, you have to pre- drill everything. Even a small nail will cause plaster to crumble. You get used to it.
At any rate, my wife, kids and I followed Phil’s instructions to start bashing and smashing out the plaster with sledgehammers. We were NOT, though, to remove any studs (the vertical structural supports in walls) because this was, in fact, a load bearing wall. If we started removing studs, the ceiling was gonna come down with ‘em.
The one thing I’ll say about plaster is that man oh man, it’s dense. That’s a nice way of saying it’s plenty heavy. As we were smashing and bashing, large sections and small chunks alike were accumulating quickly on the floor and even though we were having a great time smashing, we had to stop and clean up every ten minutes or so. This entailed filling those monstrous 44-gallon Rural King heavy-duty trash bags with plaster and plaster dust and not overfilling it to the point that it was too heavy to drag somewhere.
Which posed the next question: where are we going to put all this stuff? Honestly, until it was everywhere in heaps, I hadn’t given it much thought (kind of like the carpet story.) Luckily, this house has a two car garage that was empty and so now all that had to be done was drag the bags the 40- foot distance to the garage without doing so much damage to the bag that it ripped and spilled out everywhere (which did happen a few times.) “We’ll deal with all of this later,” I told the boys. “Later” is almost always better when it comes to trash.
So after several hours of this, we have a clear view of the kitchen, right? Not so fast. Plaster, is applied as a paste of sorts and as such, needs something to stick to. That something is called lath. Laths are thin strips of wood nailed horizontally to the studs. It’s not so hard to deal with lath; most of the time you can just take the claw end of a hammer and pull down hard with it and the lath just splinters into a million pieces, large and small, contributing to the mess.
If you’re really lucky (*sarcasm alert,) there will be blown insulation behind the lath, probably black from time, and guaranteed to make you so filthy that you’ll want to hose off outside before taking an actual shower. But these being interior walls, there was no insulation. So soon enough, we could, in fact, see through to the kitchen between the studs (remember, Phil said to leave the studs.)
The plan was to install a header, which is a heavy structural beam that will support the weight of the ceiling in place of the wall(s) being removed. It turns out that doing so is not so scary, so long as you’ve got a guy like Phil on your side. The beam itself is nothing more than a couple of 2” x 12” boards screwed together a lotta times, long enough to span the width of the room. Notches are made on each wall or additional vertical supports are put in place to support the ends of the header. With two people, you can rest the ends on the supports and screw that thing down. Take the studs out of the old wall AFTER that header is in place and…. Voila. I can now see that kitchen plain as day from the front door.
After the header is installed it can be covered with drywall to blend in with the ceiling or covered with wood paneling or something similar that will make it stand out. Both can work very well, depending on your taste and the existing style of the space.
Naturally there are more reasons to undertake such a substantial move as removing a wall. Open concept floor plans are highly sought after by many buyers and so long as a qualified contractor is in the loop, even old houses can often be opened up. I doubt you’ll regret the decision. You will still want to delineate the spaces in some way, but there are many ways to do so without walls. Tearing down walls turns out to be a great day to open up a home’s heart and soul.