Eaton Kitchen: wall removal

A key strategy for creating spaciousness in the Eaton Kitchen was to demolish a troublesome wall between the kitchen and dining room to create an "eat-in kitchen". Yes: an eat-in kitchen for the Eaton Kitchen.

But "demolish" sounds a little heroic. Really it was more like a "careful dismantling".

Unlike in a home improvement show where people take sledgehammers to everything that moves, in the real world sometimes walls require some boring, non-smashy consideration. This wall, for example, contained plumbing (kitchen sink + dishwasher) and a fair amount of electrical, all of which needed to be properly trimmed, capped, and re-routed in anticipation of the next phase of construction. I suppose I could've bashed it apart and gotten better ratings for the episode, but the season would've been two unnecessary episodes longer. So in this case, I front loaded The Boring.

And in the end, the cumulative thoughtfulness paid off: taking out the wall was definitely the right move. The shared windows and lighting of Eaton Kitchen's "eat-in kitchen" meant that both rooms-- the dining room + kitchen-- both felt bigger, even though technically the dining room had shrunk.