Cole Harris
You’re the proud owner of an older home that you purchased for its accents and its overall charm. However, lately when you walk through the front door of your home you feel like something isn’t right. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but for some reason or another you feel kind of closed in and cramped for space. It’s time to consider making some changes to that old world charm with a little home improvement.
It can be difficult to thrive in an older home with a closed floor plan, where you’re forced to move from room to room like a mouse in a maze. While you might think that you’re locked into the design of the home, older homes are structural sound when compared with a lot of simpler modern designs. There’s a lot you can do to change that floor plan so it’s more comfortable.
With this sort of home improvement project you may have to tear down a wall or two. If this is the case you may want to skip doing the work on your own and instead work with a general contractor. They can give you an idea of the cost of the project as well as whether or not it’s a good to alter the structure of your home (and where it’s safe to do so). In some cases you may not be able to alter certain areas because of load bearing walls.
Load bearing walls can put a damper on your home improvement but it’s not a problem that can’t be dealt with in some creative manner. You may hit a brick wall (pun intended) but a general contractor can draw on their home improvement experience to find methods around the load bearing wall that will still open your floor space up – right down to installing pillars the offer up load bearing where the wall can then be removed.
Once the load bearing walls are dealt with, the other walls in the home can be modified and adjusted to give you a new look and feel in your home. Often these homes had dining rooms that were closed off on their own, connected to a great room and entry way that led to the other rooms and halls. Some older homes had a large central foyer that connected to a number of adjacent rooms. In these cases you can create half-walls interior “window” space to open rooms up without actually removing walls.
