New McDonald

Trim Beam: "The most difficult part of combining the living and dining rooms was that the ‘fake’ Colonial ceiling beams in the dining space"—which took the already-low seven-foot ceilings down to a head-scraping six feet four inches—"turned out to be structural," says Bardt. Working with an engineer, he and Leski "shaved down" the beams and reinforced them to achieve a uniform ceiling height "without tearing the house apart."