It's an Inside job...

Well...

Starting essentially from the beginning, Victoria and I have looked at the envelope (the outside of the house) and TOTALLY re-imagined the space... this, of course, means that we have to remove all of the walls in the interior and put in new ones where-for now- only we can see them (in "FutureLand"!)
Putting up walls in new construction is a snap- lay it out on the deck- nail it together- tip it up into place! Putting up walls in an old house is not a snap... it's not a button, or zipper or even a buckle!

In an old house, with chimenys and stairs and bearing walls, etc., you don't have a big flat place to layout your entire wall so you can put it together. So you get to look at each individual wall as a puzzle that has to be divided into parts that get individually assembled (usually at the other end of the house where the room with the biggest open floor is) and then passed through openings and doorways, to be reconvened as the wall that you imagined in the correct location.
It's a lot of math. Oh boy, yes it is...

One of the "Funny" things about old houses is that while we know that they all probably started out true and square with flat floors and ceilings, 100-or-so years later they don't have any of those things. Often, as you measure to fit the new wall into the old place, you have to measure the ceiling heights along the path of the wall and cut different stud lengths for each position along the way. And, Yes, it's almost as much fun to take apart your new wall, after putting in the studs in the wrong order, as it was to put it together the first time! Squishing closets in between masonry is fun!
Eventually, if you do a lot of this for 3200 square feet, it begins to resemble what you imagined when you looked at the back of the napkin together...

The language of framing sounds like a badly written piece of Film Noir- your day is populated with 'studs' -King studs and Jack studs- and 'cripples' and 'headers' and 'sills' and 'plates'... Heady LaMar brings lunch and there's always scratchy violins playing in the middle distance...
Here is Xan in front of the left-hand wall of her Kookie Bar!