Lots of considerations here. Its your home not a museum. I have seen many people take the wall down and I think it greatly improves their use of the house. The kitchen was used much differently 100 years ago than now! I would say though that if you do take the wall down I would make it all wood floors. I hate to give up on the old flooring so i feel your pain on this.

Hi....I have seen many very long threads addressing this topic on the Old House forum. I myself, for myself, am a bit of a purist. I live in an old house as well, and we bought it because we love the character of an old home.....also the separation it provides. We are not great room kind of people. The thought of tearing down a dining room wall makes me cringe.....But.....at the end of the day, it is your home, and you have to live in it, and be comfortable and happy. Do what feels right to you and your family....

I think the rooms can be opened to each other if you do it in a thoughtful way. Instead of just blowing out the entire wall, perhaps a large archway or opening that looks as if it could have had pocket doors at one time would be more appropriate.

It doesn't have to be accurate, the opening could be large, but Hint at a separation and be detailed like the other openings in the house--even if it were just a header with a bit of wall at each side.

I would do the same floors all the way through. Are the old floors too thin to be refinished? Rather than prefinished floors I would use site finished floors like strip oak and if you can't do all three rooms at this time do the kitchen and the space it opens into and leave the rest til later, but if it is site finished it can all be matched.

one of the things that bugs me most in any home is interruptions in flooring. it would always be my preference to continue the wood, especially since you're creating one big room ...one room, one floor.
but you'll need to be mindful of how the new wood will run into the old, as not to create a visable seam. also, the worse case scenerio is that the new wood may not match the old and you'll have to rip out the old floor and just lay a completely new floor. -this happened to us while renovating our first house. good luck!

For a small (26' x 26') 1923 Sears kit house foursquare, we removed the wall between the kitchen and the DR, and I think that newly opened space is a vast improvement. (Of course, in 30 years or so, someone else will be yelling "What were they THINKING in taking down this wall and thus violating the original flow of the house?")

After we peeled off several layers of vinyl and linoleum, we found the original oak floors in the kitchen were readily redeemable when we refinished the rest of the downstairs. Had they not been, I think I would have gone for cork in as near the color of the woods floors as possible.

before

not quite after but getting there

Best of luck.

wow honorbilkit...great results! Do I see honed black granite there? (love) and your island stools...love them too. We're breaking ground on Tuesday for the same kind of project; you've inspired me. Thanks for posting! (where'd you get those stools?!)

i vote for extending the wood floor if you do remove the wall. i would also encourage you to take your time and consider all options before you proceed so you are truly comfortable with your decision. i felt pressured to make decisions and when i told the GC and cab maker to cool their jets, it really helped alot!

Sorry OT here but honorbiltkit LOVE the turquoise cabinets in your kitchen :)

I am in the middle of remodel. We took the wall out between our dining room and kitchen in our 1908(ish) foursquare! On the first floor every other room is open to the other with a wide doorway - with pillars and substantial woodwork. It seemed silly to me to have a 30" wide doorway between the kitchen and dining. We have a header, and will recreate the same type of woodwork between these two rooms, minus the pillars.

We are very fortunate to already have the original wood floors in the kitchen. We had to patch the spot where the wall once was, but were able to remove boards from under some cabinets to fill in. If our hardwood wouldn't have been in good shape, I would have probably done marmoleum to stay somewhat authentic.

I did inset shaker cabinets because that was what was in the house originally ( I have the originals in my basement!!) BUT I also LOVE inset painted shakers. I tried to chose things that would flow nicely with the rest of the house, but also wanted to have a modern 21st century kitchen. IMO i think permanent or long term built in things like cabinets, should "match" the house style.

You can see a little bit of my open doorway with pillar and bookcase in the 2nd to last photo in the link.

Here is a link that might be useful: pics that shows my before and during.

Few things made me happier in my kitchen than exposing the original 1900's pine floor, which had already been refinished in the rest of the house. Before, the kitchen seemed like it wasn't a part of the same house. After, it's fully-integrated. A few befores and durings:
vinyl before:

Sanding:

First coat of waterlox:

Fourth coat of waterlox:

Floor finished:

As for the wall removal; there is something objectionable about always repeating the canard "Your house is not a museum" when backing up the case for being as instrusive and disresectful to the heritage of a structure. There is a vast continuum between museum-quality work and utter crap work, or razing of the building. I think keeping somewhere past the median of this continuum (toward the "good side" if you will) is a good idea. A wide-open plan never really works in an old house especially a foursquare since it has no connecting hallways. I would lean towards a set of wide french doors, even with good size sidelights to give an 8-10 foot glass wall, before I'd let the separation between spaces come completely down.
That's just me, the old-house purist. Yes, I have central heat, electricity and indoor plumbing. So I'm also a sellout by some extreme definition.
Casey

We recently opened up the kitchen and dining room in our 1920's house (we added on a new kitchen as part of the project) - we continued the wood flooring to have the rooms look they have always been connected. (I would not even let the flooring guys do a threshold and we had to redo the whole DR floor in order not to have one). The floors were a huge priority for me and we lived in the house for 7 years until we could do the floors (AND windows, trim, etc..) the way I wanted to, which took a lot of teeth-gritting patience! :-) So since you asked, yes if it were me - I would wait until all of the flooring could be consistently wood.

We also wanted a more open floorplan but also wanted to respect the integrity of the home. We solved this by having the rooms open to one another with an archway that mimics original arches at the front of the house. It really helps the flow of the house and helps gives the house a visual sense of continuity (which is hard to put your finger on until it is not there).

Personally, I think the basic integrity of an older home should be respected (uniform hardwoods, consistent molding, consistent ceiling heights, etc) but I think a lot of additional functionality can be obtained with thoughtful changes that respect the bones of the house. I am also fan of modern touches within that - I am definitely not a purist!

Here is our dining room kitchen opening - the original kitchen was the back part of the dining room (from the left of the window to the wall - it was crazy small) and we simply included the kitchen square footage into the original dining room to gives us room for a larger table.

With great trepidation, I would like to amend Casey's final paragraph by bringing up the issue of scale.

If you have a kitchen the size of Casey's in a house the bespokeness (is that a word?) of Casey's original, I would certainly think very hard about what you want to achieve before taking down a wall.

If you start out with a kitchen that is 10 x 11 -- i.e., one in which "a set of wide french doors" would remove a significant amount of the useable wall space -- then the opening up per se is likely to be the goal.

I figure that with a run of upper and lower cabinets ending about where the wall was on one side of the kitchen "entry" and a to-the-ceiling boxed-in chimney with a two-seat peninsula attached on the other, the opening I have gained is approximately the area of a (clearly more elegant) set of French doors with sidelights.

To me the bigger issue was whether I could keep my kitchen neat enough that I want it to be visible from the erstwhile dining room. I had to choose between remaining anarchic in a small dark space or trying to be more orderly in a more open space. It was really no contest.

So, pitpat, I hope you will post photos and plans of your first floor, with the prospect that they will attract insights specific to your exact space. This forum (including the older bits that can only be accessed via a search engine) is rife with every kind of problem and solution and five-layers-of-contingency plan and break-through ideas. And TKO people ranging from timorous to imperious in their sharing are standing by to help you examine your options.

Cheers.

Thank you so much for all your responses, everyone. I will try to post pictures shortly. A couple things: 1) the openings between the LR & DR and between the foyer & LR are just plain, rectangular openings, so that would be easy to replicate. 2) French doors wouldn't really work b/c they would take up the space that the wall takes up now. To me, the main advantage of taking out the wall would be increasing the kitchen space a little bit (enough for the island and breakfast bar).

Also, I should have been more specific about taking out the wall. The whole thing would not be removed, it would just be opened up considerably, rather like the archway (it is an "archway" if it's not arched??) between the LR and DR.

I realize this is hard to respond to w/o pictures. I had started this thread mainly to ask about continuing the flooring, and then I tacked on the question about whether or not to take down the wall. Obviously, there's a lot to think about there. I'll return...

pitpat you started a great thread, but inadvertently ventured into one of the biggest debates of all time, witness the discussion between honorbiltkit and sombreuil mongrel, both of whom have done incredible renovations to their kitchens, as their photos attest. This is of interest to me and all old-house people, and is dealt with in books like Bungalow Kitchen. I think it will help if you post pictures and also just sit and look at your house for a while. I think that sometimes you can make a change that, while it is not in keeping with the way the house originally looked, is still, nonetheless, an improvement, if done sensitively and respectfully -- you can arrive at something (like honorbiltkit did) that if not the way it originally was, is nonetheless arguably the way it should have been. I do think that you should keep continuity in the flooring if at all possible. It's OK (IMHO) to change flooring when there is a defined door way and door but if you open up to something like an arch or portal, keep the wood all the way through.

Our house was built in 1935 and the kitchen had some real quirks...in the back of the house, cut off from the rest of the primary living space (except dining room). And to boot it had 5 doorways in it (basement, mudroom, bathroom, dining room, tiny second stairway door)...we had to make some major changes in order to achieve a functional kitchen. THis included ripping up layers of linoleum to reveal beautiful original hardwoods which we refinished - to match the rest of the house. We also opted to close the tiny stairway door, and knock down the front hall closet to create a short hallway directly to the kitchen from the front door.
We definitely tinkered (tastefully I think) with the home's original character, but we reused flooring, trim and moldings where possible, and gained a much more functional space which otherwise would not have been worth spending a penny on. Small sacrafices were necessary in order to make the space more liveable, and I think we still respected the home's integrity. I will try to post some pictures, but we're still in progres...

Before going any further, post a full layout of your kitchen and the proposed plans. You'll get better ideas here than anywhere else. There may be a better solution for you.

I think a tastefully done opening, not a blownout wall, but a nicely framed opening as I'm sure you plan will be fine.

The floor should be continuous, or really close with a tidy line of change. If you go with the opening (unarched arch!) like Palimpsest describes, it allows you to do something like change the direction of the wood floor, or put in a decorative "I meant to do that" section of flooring running a different direction so that the new floor needn't be the exact duplicate of the other.

If your old floors are okay and don't need refinishing, you'll be surprised what a good floor team can do to match. Or even if they are in need of replacement, in a few years, the new can match and tie into the kitchen perfectly.

Anyway I think the kitchen should have wood too, but it needn't be identical. Or it needn't be identical now and you can plan for future identicalness.

OK, I have uploaded pictures onto my photobucket account. There are 9 of the kitchen and dining room. For the pictures that show where the opening would be, I made a copy and drew a (very squiggly) black line to show approximately where the opening would be. I also did 2 with the island drawn in. That is the piece that would require opening up the space. Please excuse the mess! And you can see from these pictures how very unworkable the kitchen is now. The main things I want to get out of a remodel are: 1) get rid of the penninsula, 2) have a breakfast bar-type thing, and 3) get more counter space. I will try to post the plans but I'm not sure how. But it may help you to know that the plans achieve all of those goals. Everything would get placed along the walls, except for the island that would go just inside the current doorway and along where the opening would be (under the framed cat picture, approximately). The inner side of the island would have a sink and counters, and the outer side would have the breakfast counter.

Here is a link that might be useful: current kitchen

Just added a picture of the plan (I have others, if need be). And I was a little off about that wall. Most of it would be coming down. Also, the DW would be in the island.