We are awesome construction workers.

As we may have written before, we wanted to open up the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. We had taken down a lot of the plaster and lath about a month ago, and here is where we began the day. To date we had succeeded in adding more walls rather than taking any away. What you see in the foreground is a temporary support wall which we put up in hopes that it would save us from disaster if we should remove the wrong piece. We ran this by our structural engineer Andy, whom we had over to the house one evening after a long dinner with many drinks, and he seemed to think it was a great idea.


Before we could begin, we had to remove a little more plaster and lath.

There goes Reagan tearing things apart. She just hates all those original finishes....


We decided to install the header one half at a time to try to keep some of the structure intact until the new structure was in place. A co-worker informs me that chipping out the slot for the header, as you see here, is called "hogging". It goes without saying that if it had been called something else we might not have tried it.


Hogging complete, we are ready to put in the first half of the header.


Here is the job half done. A purist will note that we have begun to remove the temporary supports before we are completely done.


Despite everything, we and the house, survived and we can now see the TV from the kitchen.


One might wonder why we went through so much effort to get this view, but we assure you the view will improve. Stay tuned.


Adam is learning to be a very good preservationist/archaeologist. On the new header and the re-used post for the new opening he wrote "2007" so that, just in case, when future preservationists investigate our house and try to figure out its construction chronology, they'll know when this one was altered.