Mr. Perkins, tear down this wall!

I just had to say that.

This wall-tearing-down project is long overdue and would have happened sooner, but we decided to restrain ourselves from having even more unfinished projects to show off to our wedding guests.

We had a long-standing theory about the layout of the first floor of the house.  The theory stated that there were several small alterations made that added up to significant changes in the flow.  According to the theory, these renovations occurred not too long after the house was built (by the early 1940s), because all the trim still pretty much matched and changes in the walls were still done with plaster.

I touched upon this theory back when I wrote about renovating the powder room.  We think that it used to be a pantry or part of the kitchen before being turned into a bathroom during these early renovations.  We found some weird blocks in the wall which wouldn't make any sense for a bathroom but would have been great for nailing on kitchen cabinets, all the paint colors and wainscoting were the same as the kitchen, and the sink we found in the attic and reused was dated 1940.

The next part of this theory we'll put to the test is that the stairs used to take a corner and land in the living room, instead of the tiny useless room that we turned into the entryway.  This part of the theory is based on the following evidence.

Zoom in like crazy and you might see a small cut in the middle of the top piece of trim.  Closet original; stairs, not so much. See all that glorious sunlight on the floor?  One of the many reasons to take the wall down is so that sunlight actually penetrates to our cave-like living room.

The black arrow indicates a cut in the banister, right above a cut in the baseboard along the stairs.  It is difficult to see, but the fourth stair up is a totally different kind of wood.

In the corners of these steps, you can see weird patches.  Perhaps old newel posts from when they stuck out into the living room?

We moved the couch one day and discovered what appeared to be a patch in the floor, and the baseboard cut in a couple of places.  

Given this evidence, we deduced that the wall may not actually be original, thus not load bearing, thus we could tear it down no problem.  Were we correct?  Stay tuned for the next installment of The Corner Lot archaeology lesson.