Demo done? NOT! Raising the door.

*Updated with a few new pics
If you have been following the blog, you will see that we have been making really good progress lately.   Celia was pretty excited to see that we were finally starting to put things back together instead of always demolishing things.  Well....  She wasn't too happy when she found out that I started the project to raise the kitchen/dining room doorway.  We had talked about it way back when we bought the house, be she apparently thought we had decided against it.  Anyhow, Celia, Dad and I  spent this weekend doing a lot of dirty demo work...  We had already knocked out the kitchen side of the wall, so we started this weekend by knocking out the dining room side.

About a foot of plaster and lathe were left intact in hopes of keeping the dining room walls presentable.

In this picture you can see the temporary braces we built to support the house while we worked on this wall. Turns out 12ft 2x4s are not easy to find so we had to rig a solution from shorter boards.

As you probably know, removing plaster and lathe is a MESSY job.  The dust gets everywhere and the plaster is so heavy it is a pain to dispose of in the regular garbage.
Once both sides of the wall were open and the supports were in place, it was time to cut out the old header and cripple studs.  The old header was not installed properly. It was lacking jack studs so the load from above was being held up by a few nails.

Here are a few pics of the new opening.  The new header can be seen here.  It is installed properly with jack studs.

Here you can see that the studs have had furring strips applied to  ready the wall for drywall.

After we finished all the above, we were anxious to get back to that feeling of "putting things back together".  We decided to put up a few sheets of drywall around the room.

Here is a pic of an adjacent wall: