Makeovers

Project Mathieu – Tearing Down the Wall

November 14, 2016

As you know this month is all about the makeover of my brother’s living room/ kitchen. And this weekend was the first and funnest part : tearing down the wall !

Since I mostly work with small budgets and renters, I don’t get to experience making structural changes all that much. I’m much more used to making over a space with colors, textures, and lighting, and it works wonders, but you always need to work around problems instead of, well, bashing them in ! Most of the time it’s a rewarding challenge, but let me tell ya, knowing that we would plow through this particular problem was very satisfying !

We were very lucky, through an acquaintance we found someone who tore it down for 150$, and took all the debris with him to throw it out. And when you live in an apartment building in Paris, that is the most amazing news you’ll ever hear ! The actual demolition was done so fast I wasn’t able to be there in person. I was pretty bummed because I think I would’ve loved to give it a good whack myself to blow off some steam (I may have some unresolved anger to work through…), but apparently it was awesome, and exactly as much fun as you hope it would be ! So I’ll share with you what I saw of it : the afters !

So this is what we were working with, a non functional sliding-door-wall that cut all the natural light in half and made life a lot less fun …

before-livingroom-2-velvetjungle

beforewall1-velvetjungle

And now, it’s a whole new world :

wallgone1-velvetjungle(Hard at work…)

The space seems so much bigger and it instantly gave us so many ideas !

wallgone5-velvetjungleI mean, look at all this amazing light in here !

It was hard to imagine how much more of a difference it would make until we saw it, especially since the wall was red. So this new view made for a very happy client and designer !

wallgone3-velvetjungle

wallgone2-velvetjungle

wallgone4-velvetjungle

We realized immediately that the kitchen needs to go as soon as possible, mostly because it’s blocking the new pathway we want to create (more on that later), but also because it’s pretty disgusting. The appliances were next to a wall and it didn’t look as bad until we saw the side ! Yikes …

So this week, the guys are going to get cracking on dismantling the kitchen, moving everything they can out of the living room for all the work that needs to be done, and figuring out the wiring for the whole room and the home theater. Meanwhile, I only have a few days left to crank out a game plan for this room. Thankfully we already discussed most of the choices, like the wall colors and the layout of both the kitchen and the living room ahead of time. So all I have to do now is put it all together visually so we can fully agree on everything before we move on, and then go out and find the perfect paint colors and select the kitchen furniture. It’s a lot but we’re so excited about this project I don’t even think we need sleep anymore, so we got that going for us !

I’ll be sharing all of this with you as soon as I’m done and then it’s progress pics for days !!

I can’t reveal too much but I’ll leave you with the best part so far : this is now the view from the kitchen. Not too shabby … !

wallgone6-velvetjungle(I’m not sure what happened here, but on behalf of my face, I apologize)

Have a great week everybody !

Save

Save

Save

You Might Also Like

No Comments

Leave a Reply

This website uses cookies and asks your personal data to enhance your browsing experience.