And the walls came down....

Our kitchen has a wall with the stove and a tiny chunk of counter, bracketed by two built-out bays, one for the fridge and one presumably for an indoor freezer. Since like most of the house the kitchen is a large room but desperately short on storage and work space, we opted for putting the freezer in the garage and building shelves/temporary counter into the freezer bay. (Temporary in this case means about a quarter of a century, of course.) Assorted mishaps in the past year or two led to the "temporary" stuff being pulled out, and the bay just sitting there.

Yesterday I (finally!) took down one of the two walls that forms the freezer bay. I'd previously confirmed that it wasn't structural, so it should have been a quick bash-and-pull. And it turns out it wasn't structural... but it was interwoven with the structure in a way that just makes me completely baffled as to what they were thinking, or even in what order it was all built. I'd assumed the room walls were built first, and the "bay" walls were tacked in later... but I think those bays must have gone up when the rest of the room did. And why was that 2x4 cross-hatched that way, and who puts a board up there to nail the ceiling drywall to that's being held down by the wall framing, and....! And one part of one layer of the bay wall (there were two layers, making a double-thick wall sticking out into the room, I have no idea why) is part of the support for one of the hewn-wood beams in the ceiling. So that's staying; I can knock it back flush to the adjacent bit of wall, but I can't take it out to make the "bay" area that four inches wider. Okay, I can cope with that. But what the hell they were thinking with supporting the beam in three or four different segments, and notching it, and.... Yeah. It's weird. The whole layout is weird, and the structure underlying it is freakin' bizarre.

But! With that one bay wall gone, the room is already vastly more open and spacious feeling. I hadn't realized that I instinctively scrunched up every time I left the kitchen that way, until now suddenly I don't have to. I can walk out of the room like a normal human being! And someone in the entryway can actually hear the person in the kitchen talking! It's only about a foot of actual floor space that's newly exposed, but the effect is downright magical.

I can't wait to see what it's like when the other bay wall is gone. Which will be trickier, because we're keeping the cabinets on the other side of it, and I won't know what's attached where until I get into it. (And what weird and unnecessary interlinkings with the structure may be in there.) And it'll be a few days, because while I can still work just as hard and long on a project as I ever could, I'm not so good about getting up and doing it all over again the next day. (And this is coming on the heels of discovering our sump pump wasn't working, in the way one usually discovers that, and all the icy-cold-water-in-crawlspace fun that involved.) But it's going to be awesome.

Tuesday was supposed to be a writing day, and this is what I did instead. Not sorry.