the family room

Now that the wall between the kitchen and family room has come down, that space is one large, combined room. The original family room was 27 feet by 19 feet, so add to that the 19-foot "legs" of the kitchen and you've got a big room. I imagine a lot of life will be lived in this great room.

We'll still have a separate dining room (perhaps my favorite room in the house... at least right now) and a large sitting room beyond the dining room that we'll use for small groups gatherings, parties, and to steal away to for a few minutes of reading or thinking or just, you know... stealing away from it all. But this space will be our together space. I love the idea of being able to cook while children play nearby, of football games on the TV while I'm cleaning up from Sunday dinner, of schoolbooks piled on the island and others piled on the coffee table.

And one of the true benefits of opening up the kitchen and family room is that all the natural light in the family room immediately gets joined to the kitchen. I love natural light.

(Except when my house is dirty. Then I prefer candlelight. Ha.)

When we closed on the house, we knew for sure that this room was going to get the bulk of our attention. Within a few hours of signing papers, we were pulling up the carpet to make way for continuous New England pine flooring throughout.

This picture shows the box window in back that the previous owners had told us needed to be addressed because it had a tendency toward leaking. You'll see later where it's been taken out and we are waiting eagerly for the new windows we ordered to come in so Daniel can install them!

We also knew that originally this family room had been an attached woodshed. When Daniel started pulling down the ceilings, we were able to get a better view of the rough timber that was used for building. It is so cool. I do wish there was a way we could leave it all exposed, but between some of the beams needing to be reinforced and the need for some soundproofing between the family room and the bedroom above, most of it will get covered up again.

You can see where the drywall originally ended and the ceiling was; by pulling down the two layers of ceiling and blown insulation, we are able to gain more than a foot more height in that room. This picture is from when the staircase in the family room had been removed but the wall wasn't gone yet.

Standing near the front door in the kitchen, looking into the family room. You can see where the wall used to be.

Once walls started getting opened up, we had a bit of an education on old insulation methods. Turns out, back in the 1850s they didn't have spray foam or rigid foam or even fiberglass batts. Who knew?! Instead, they often used brick in between the exterior and interior walls to help radiate some of the interior heat back into the home. Removing all that brick was somewhat tedious, but we were blessed to be able to hire some young guys to do a lot of it. We would be totally off-track in terms of our timeline if Daniel had had to take each one of those bricks out himself!

Pictured: Josiah taking the bricks out--carefully! There were bricks in almost every single exterior wall we exposed. Tomorrow the spray foam guy comes and the house will feel a whole lot warmer than it currently does!

Another thing we had been told about in advance was how one exterior wall of the family room bows quite a bit. After opening it all up, Daniel was glad to find that nothing is shifting and that it's the actual beam that runs the 27-foot length of the room that was itself simply not square; the wall had been built to match its contour. Our best guess is that since the room was originally just a woodshed of sorts, they weren't as concerned about making sure things were plumb, because the rest of the house is much more square. The solution was to build the wall out slightly to get it a bit straighter. Daniel "broke" the news to me that the window jambs would be quite a bit deeper before he was done; I had to ask him if he knows me at all that he would even wonder if that would be a disappointment???

I know you all feel badly for me that I have to deal with such deep windowsills.

Another thing we're changing is removing the old woodshed door and replacing the box window with two side-by-side 32"x60" windows. The day Daniel cut for the windows was the first day of real snow around these parts; he said the view of the snow-laden backyard was breathtaking.

After the old window had been taken out and before Daniel cut for the new one. That's the door we'll be removing, as well.

Ready and waiting for those new windows to come in! Please ignore the ladder. Construction materials and tools are our decor of choice these days.

We are replacing the wood stove in the corner with a smaller wood stove. I really wanted to make sure we had something appropriately sized just for the room since the dual oil/wood furnace in the basement is the main (and a fantastic) source of heat for the whole house and too big a stove in there would mean a really hot family room/kitchen. We found a little Scandinavian stove sized for >1000 square feet (the family room + kitchen is a little under 900 square feet altogether) and now the big debate is on how to install it. Initially I'd hoped for a faux fireplace of sorts to set it into, however the budget-- which has been infringed upon by the unexpected insulation costs and more drywall/mudding/taping than we'd planned for-- might require we do something simpler, at which point I'm very glad that the placement of the stove pipe is far enough away from the walls to meet clearances for combustible materials, since a huge stone wall doesn't quite fit the era of the home. I'm thinking we'll simply do shiplap behind it.

This back portion of the family room was, we're guessing, originally part of a back porch. The construction is totally different. We'll be leaving the ceiling in this part vaulted (there is nothing above it) and back here is where we'll set up the kitchen/school table.

We are eager to start putting the room back together. Daniel is is spending his day off today frantically trying to finish electrical before the insulation guy comes tomorrow. After that, the fun will really begin as it all begins to take shape. I can hardly wait!