Ch ch ch changes! (Sing it like David Bowie)

So today we started renovating the room we've been calling "the pit."  It is an informal living room that is a step and a half lower than the rest of the first story because it's been built directly on concrete slab.  It has wide openings to the kitchen towards the rear of the house and to the foyer in the front of the house.  On this level there is also a dumb little office and a coat closet.  All these rooms feature wallpaper on the walls and ceiling, yes even in the closet!  Our game plan is to remove the wall separating the main room from a dumb office.  Here is the starting point:

I will take this time to point out we ran a carpet cleaner over this nonsense twice and the absurd skid marks from years of recliner use are permanent.  And don't judge our mess, we're just trying to spread all of our belongings from the ~680 sq.ft. apartment to the ~2,400 sq.ft. house.

We did a lot of climbing around  in the attic and himming and hawing about whether the dividing wall was load bearing or not.  Matt is trying to get me to pay attention to some detail about the ceiling joists, I am slacking.

The drywall removal began and went pretty quickly.  We used the sawzall (favorite tool by far) to split the studs which weren't even actual 2x4's and Matt used his mass to pry the footer off of the nails that were in the concrete slab.

Done for the night!

There is a slight difference in the ceiling height and wall depth in the office vs the main room.  I think we'll handle this by adding some wooden strips to the ceiling/walls to support a new layer of drywall that will be level with the rest of the room.  We can't think of another way to handle this properly or hide it decoratively so comments are welcome!  Hopefully more to follow soon, assuming we're not too beat.