So, what the heck is a Keeping Room?

A keeping room is a secondary living room that connects to the kitchen area.

I read that Keeping Rooms are coming back into vogue and I just happen to have one after our main floor renovation! Of course, we all know that with a careful Internet search we can find confirmation of pretty much anything we want =)

So, full disclosure, I didn’t start our renovation with the intent of having one, I hadn’t even considered one. But as we worked our way through our renovation, I had a space that was telling me she was special and I had to call it something when we were done.

An Internet Search christened her the Keeping Room.

After you check out my post, you’re going to want one too!

Why we have a Keeping Room – it was a gift!

If you’ve been following along you already know that we moved our kitchen to our old den and our dining room into our old kitchen. Big projects that we handled completely DIY – you can follow the links below to check them out:

DIY Renovation of a Dining Room

Renovation of Kitchen – Floors, Cabinets and Appliances

After we were done we had the space from the old dining room. The space was kind of like a gift, so we needed to use it in an amazing way!

Our new kitchen and dining rooms are connected and open to each other. Since this room would connect and be open to the living room and new dining room, it made sense to use it as an area that a smaller group of guests could be seated to chat, but still feel like they were part of the larger group that was in the kitchen where people tend to linger.

Which brings us back to my original question. So, what the heck is a keeping room? According to Google, a keeping room is simply a secondary living room that connects to the kitchen area. Well, there you go . . . I have a Keeping Room!

The old space before demo

To begin with, let me share some pictures of the room before we began any of the renovations. The renovations run together somewhat because we opened so much up so I really encourage you to go back and check out the earlier posts.

This is a picture from the realtor page when we purchased the house. The windows on the right are now an amazing window seat. The doorway on the left went into the area that was the kitchen before renovations began.

The following picture is looking into the Keeping Room from the Living Room. That wall where the fireplace is now completely different also. You can check out that really amazing fireplace with built-ins and the entire family room project by following this link:

DIY Renovation of a Family Room

Yikes, I don’t think this is what a keeping room is supposed to keep

Now below is what the room looked like the entire time we were working on the kitchen and dining rooms. We didn’t want to get rid of anything until after we were done renovating because you never know what you may need so we piled furniture on top of furniture. Yes, this was really hard for a girl who wants everything to have a place and be put in its place!

DEMO!!

As I’ve mentioned because we were changing the footprint so much, we had to do a lot of demo long before we began the process of rebuilding. We had to remove the wall to the left of the windows which joined the former kitchen. We also enlarged, significantly, the opening between the living room and the new keeping room.

In the below picture you can see how much of the walls between the three rooms were removed by looking at the floor. See that shop vac? Underneath and to the left of it you can see where there isn’t any of the old wood floor – that’s where the old wall was separating the living and dining (er, keeping) rooms. Where the new wood joins the old wood is approximately where the wall was that separated the kitchen and keeping rooms.

Here you are looking at the new opening from the living room. Because of the span of the new opening, we had to install a 16 foot laminated beam. Actually, to be extra safe, we took two laminated beams and glued and screwed them together. One heeeeeavy beam for TJ and I to lift into place. This is just one of the places where our Drywall Lift saved the day. In order to install the beam, we built a temporary wall using old 2 x 4s, removed the existing wall, lifted the laminated beam into place and then removed the temporary wall.

So that’s a lot of stuff I know. So much that I’ve decided to stop here and do a separate post on just the reveal.

Wait for it!! It’ll be worth it =)