Opening up a closed floor plan: why walls come down in older homes

Walk into a lot of older Abilene houses and you'll notice the same thing: the rooms are small, the doors are closed, and the kitchen is tucked away at the back where the cook can't see anyone. It made sense when the house was built. It doesn't match how most families live now. That's why so many of our projects start with the same line in the plan: walls come down.

Why we take walls out

Think about how a typical evening goes. Someone is cooking, someone is doing homework at the table, someone is trying to follow a conversation from the next room. In a closed plan, all of that happens behind separate doors. In an open one, it happens together.

At Brentwood Ranch, when we first walked in we saw all the potential the house had. We knew several walls needed to come down to open up the living space. It's a three bedroom, two bath rambling ranch, and once the walls were out, the living area could finally feel as generous as the house actually was. A neighbor ended up buying it when we finished, which was a thrill, and we got to work with the future homeowner during the renovation.

Elmwood is another example. There we created an open concept living and dining space for modern living. And the Mid-Century Farmhouse finished with an open concept layout and tall ceilings, which is a good picture of what we mean. Those are rooms made for having people over.

What an open plan gives you

Light is the first thing. When you remove an interior wall, daylight from one side of the house can reach the other. Rooms that felt dim start to feel bigger.

Sight lines come second. You can see the whole space from the kitchen, which matters when you're hosting or just keeping an eye on the kids. Furniture arrangement gets easier too, since you're no longer boxed in by wherever the old walls happened to be.

And then there's flow. People move through a house more naturally when they aren't squeezing through a narrow doorway between every room.

A note on load-bearing walls

Not every wall can come out, and this is where we'd urge real caution. Some interior walls carry the weight of the roof or the floor above, and removing one without the right support can be serious. You can't always tell by looking. Older houses in particular may have been altered over the years in ways that aren't obvious.

In general, a wall near the middle of the house, or one running across the direction of the ceiling joists, deserves the closest look. A qualified professional should assess any wall before it's touched. If it turns out to be structural, the answer is usually to carry that load another way, with a properly sized beam and posts, and that is work for people who do it for a living.

If you're a homeowner thinking about doing this to your own place, please don't swing a hammer first. Get someone qualified to look at it.

Open doesn't have to mean empty

One risk with opening a floor plan is ending up with one giant room where nothing feels defined. We try to keep some sense of zones. A kitchen island can mark the edge of the cooking area. A fireplace can anchor the living space. At Brentwood Ranch, custom cabinets and shelving help give the opened-up room some shape, so it reads as a place to live rather than a hall.

Plumbing, ductwork and wiring also tend to live inside walls. When a wall comes out, those things often have to be rerouted, and that's part of why opening up a plan is a bigger decision than it looks. It's rarely only about the wall.

Sometimes the answer is a partial opening, such as a wide cased opening in place of a full removal. That keeps a little separation while still letting light and sight lines through. Not every house wants to be wide open.

When the old walls stay

We don't take down walls for the sake of it. When a layout already works, we leave it alone. On Grand Avenue we fell in love with the layout and character of the house, so the design built on what was there instead of throwing it out, and it still ended up open and good for hosting. The walls we remove are the ones keeping a house from serving the family living in it.

If you own an older house with closed-off rooms and wonder whether it's the kind of place we might be interested in, call us at (325) 261-3855 or email nikigrant89@gmail.com. We enjoy that kind of conversation.