Todd’s living room, opened to the dining room

Todd had a living room and a dining room in his Cypress home with a full wall between them, and he wanted the two rooms to work as one. The wall was not load-bearing, which kept this a clean carpentry and finish job rather than a structural one.

Before a single cut, we laid floor protection across the tile on both sides and taped every seam. Then the drywall came off both faces so we could see what was inside the wall before the framing came out. A cable run and two outlets lived in that wall, so we rerouted the wiring into the walls that stayed, licensed pros where the code calls for it. Then we cut the studs free at the plate and took the framing out.

By the evening of the first day the new opening was framed and hung with drywall. Over the next two days we taped, floated and textured the new surfaces to match the rooms, cased the opening, set the baseboards back around it, and painted. Where the wall had stood, the two rooms had tile laid in different directions with a gap between them. We milled a wide piece of wood, stained it to match the floors, and set it into that gap as one oversized threshold.

Three days after we started, the dining table is in plain view from the living room and the two spaces read as one. The work that matters most on a job like this is the finish: texture that matches and trim that lines up, so the opening looks like it was always part of the house.

Scope of work

• Floor protection laid and taped on both sides before demo
• Non-load-bearing wall opened, wiring rerouted, studs cut out
• Wide new opening framed
• Drywall hung, taped, floated and textured to match
• Opening cased, baseboards returned
• Custom wood threshold stained to match the floors, set where the wall stood
• Walls painted

Service: Trim carpentry

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