John, when we bought this house at the beginning of '92 we had 2 months before the apartment lease was up. So I had the opportunity to get over here after work and do some things prior to going back to the apartment for the night. One of those things was tearing out a wall between two small bedrooms to create a master. I could do the demo and reno without living in the mess at night.
In the spirit of that, we closed on the house and then ONE HOUR later had my folks over. I handed my dad a hammer and lead him to one of the two back bedrooms. I told him that He could put holes in MY walls for a change. (yeah, I was a little rough on the equipment growing up....) And sonofagun, if the ol' man didn't have this look of GLEE as he whacked at my drywall. I'd call it positively cathartic. At inspection, prior to closing, we checked the orientation of the trusses for the roof system and determined that the wall to come out was running in parallel with the trusses - so it wasn't structural. So when we bought it we knew that demo work was about to begin. So out it came and I've now got a generously sized master.
Then I did most of the lower level buildout myself. There used to be a 1 car garage in the lower level of the house, which is now living space. I blew up the 1000 sq ft lower level out to four outside foundation walls and then rebuilt every stick of framing, every outlet, every recessed light in the place. It merged the garage back into open space, I rebuilt the geometry of the 1/2 bathroom, adding in a Jacuzzi bathtub-sized jetted tub (loml thanks me!) to make it a full bath, and then redid the geometry of the laundryroom so that it actually functions as it should.
In that remodel I hid both Lolly columns inside some walls. To do that I extended a wall and created a closet space in the laundry room, and it offered the opportunity to build a small wet bar at the other end of the living room. The walls look great. I actually got good at rock/tape/mud. The built in book cases and the woodwork surrounding the wet bar is.... well, let's just say that my woodworking tooling/skills at the time were suspect. *grin*
Yeah, one or two architectural changes!
*INHALE.....* so long story a little longer than it needed to be... I've got some work to redo from the renovation madness that consumed me during the '90's.
