Our living room project is in full swing, and I am so excited that our built-in bookcases are gone! It may seem crazy to remove custom, built-in shelves, but our living room was just not the place these shelves. Here’s what it looked like before (upper right):
Here is what our living room looks like today:
Yay – no more empty shelves! The radiator is coming out today, and then we can clean things up and reclaim a good bit of floor and wall space. Stay tuned for more updates!
Everybody has their own preferences – I personally would love to have them, because I have too much bulky furniture as is. But I like your living room. It seems… roomy. So much more spacious than before. Congrats on your updates!
How fun! I can’t wait to see what you do with the space!
How did you go about removing radiators?? We have a 90+ year old house in Connecticut with steam heat/radiators and would love to remove them. Did you write about that process?
Hi Erin,
A previous owner of our house had already cut the pipes in our crawl space and drained the radiators, so we just had to remove the empty radiators. We hired a very handy friend of ours to take them out, and he had to cut them into 3 smaller pieces to get them onto a dolly and out of the house. We also had a plumber check out the previous owner’s work to make sure the radiators had been properly drained and that the pipes were properly capped (which they weren’t). Once the radiators were out, we just needed to repair the walls and floors behind them. The whole process took longer than I thought, particularly refinishing the floors – yuck. But, I’m so glad we did it! The extra floor space makes a big difference, and I can finally hang long curtains!
Hope this helps!
Rachel