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. You 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.