So, here’s a few “before” pictures of the dining room before demolition:

The dining room entrance from the kitchen was boarded up during kitchen demo, since we were still using the room to store and box stuff up while we were moving out. The plywood barrier and hallway door (open in the photo) established the border between the work site and our remaining living area. Regardless of the barriers, we always come home to this quasi-post-apocalyptic scene, and find everything we own covered in a layer of white dust, like nuclear fallout.

Dining room before demo, looking into the kitchen:

Demo begins:

Original 1925 framing exposed:

No more parties in this room, like this one in 2005 (during the dining room’s Purple Period):

Perhaps the most illustrious function the old dining room ever served was to accommodate the turducken that Bill and I made for a Christmas party. Here’s the trussed-up beast, after 12 hours in the oven:

And here’s how it looked inside – a turkey, stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken, with cornmeal stuffing between every awesome layer:

Ah, but there will be no more dining room for future turduckens. Instead, we now have this blank canvas:

The hallway between the dining room and powder room before:

And, after:

The doorway to downstairs (the other half of the original French doors to the dining room [the first half is in the basement, separating the quasi-enclosed under-porch area from the furnace room]). The wall to the powder room added in 1999 is to the right.

After demo of the powder room (the chunk out of the wall is from some preliminary exploratory work to see if the bricks that form the east wall can be exposed – jury’s still out on this):