Building & remodeling trends for 2020

Tear down those walls! I know this was a cheesy reference to an old speech but building trends in 2020 and beyond are doing exactly that. Tearing down walls. Or, not putting them up during the building process. I for one love the wide-open space of combing rooms and increasing the feel of a much bigger living space. even a small home or addition is obviously bigger. The downside to an open living space is the loss of storage. You give that up with open spaces.

We remodeled our upper-level kitchen, living room, and dining nook and in the process took out all of the walls, a hallway, a partition, and a closet. The reason we did this was that we never used the living room because there was a huge wall and dining nook separating the kitchen from the living room. That wall divided the cook in the kitchen from guests in the living room. As you can imagine, nobody went into the living room because everyone wanted to be near the food in the kitchen. So the big living room with all the comfortable seating went unused and 12 people would squeeze into our galley kitchen. This drove us nuts! The solution? Tear down the wall and open the area up where even if guests were sitting in the living area they could still converse with the person preparing the meal.

The entire remodeled room is only 660 square feet but now it seems huge. The fireplace gets used. The dining room table is used and the room is buzzing with activity.

But, losing the closet space near the front door kind of hurts. When guests come over we have to put their coats in the bedroom or in the office. This is a small price to pay because we live in the room every day but friends and family come over every few months or so. When we remodeled the lower level we tore out the wall divided the living area from the laundry room and made the lower level 1000 square feet. We blocked off the furnace and laundry room and that is our storage area for the entire house. For outer storage facility you can learn about us  here.We became minimalists by default. It’s nice because we have nothing extra. We are very conscious of what we buy because if we buy something new it means we have to get rid of something we already have. We are not going to put something in our storage area thinking we might use it again someday. Nope! Not going to happen because there’s no room for extras. It’s very liberating to live this way. But in case there is need for extra storage one can go to this web-site to get more info on the same.

It’s not difficult to change how you live once you commit to a wide-open look. Tear down walls and open up rooms provides huge advantages to a beautiful look. Wood floors seem much prettier. Area rugs are stunning and walls can be filled with art that can be seen from many locations in the room. Ceiling speakers fill the room with music where before you had to go into the other toom to hear it. Recessed lighting eliminates the need for floor and table lamps that are all controlled by a wall switch. It’s beautiful and all at the price of tearing down walls.