My neighbor’s house is 1,100 square feet and it feels bigger than my old 1,600 square foot rental in Aurora. Same era of construction. Same narrow lot. The difference is that she stopped treating her walls as fixed furniture and started treating them as decisions. That is the whole game with a small Denver home. You are not short on space. You are short on openings. Every wall you never touch is a wall doing nothing but holding sheetrock and a couch.
So the work here is simple to describe and slow to do: figure out which walls are load bearing, which ones are just drywall and opinions, and which doorway is quietly stealing the best square footage in your house. Walk your main floor tonight with a notepad. Mark every spot where two people have to shuffle past each other. That list is your project scope.
Why so many Denver homes were built tight on purpose
Most of the housing stock in this city went up fast during boom periods. Builders were selling lots and mortgages, not floor plans. Rooms got chopped into separate boxes because that is what a 1950s family wanted: a kitchen you closed off, a formal dining room you used twice a year, a front living room nobody was allowed to sit in. You inherited those walls. You did not choose them.
The census data backs up the scale of it. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the typical American home is nowhere near the sprawling square footage people imagine, and a large share of the country’s housing was built before 1980. Denver is a textbook case. If your place was built before 1990, you are probably living inside a floor plan designed for a different family with different furniture and a different idea of what a kitchen is for. That is good news, weirdly. Old walls are usually easier to reason about than new ones, because the structure is straightforward and the trades have seen your exact framing a thousand times.
Should you remove a wall or open a doorway?
Honest answer: usually the doorway, and it costs a fraction of what people expect.
I have watched three friends in this city pay for full wall removals when what they actually wanted was sightlines. They wanted to see the kids from the kitchen. They wanted the dining table to stop feeling like a conference room. A wide opening does all of that. Removing the entire wall mostly buys you a beam, an engineer, a permit, and a drywall crew.
Here is the order I would work in:
- Widen an existing interior doorway. Cheapest real change you can make. Going from a standard 32 inch opening to 48 or 60 inches changes how a whole floor feels.
- Reframe a pass through. A half wall between kitchen and living area keeps your cabinets and your plumbing where they are.
- Open the exterior. This is where you get the biggest jump, because you are adding light and usable outdoor space at the same time.
- Remove a wall. Only after a structural engineer signs off and you have priced the beam, the electrical rerouting, and the flooring patch. The flooring patch is the line item everyone forgets.
Skip step four if a doorway gets you 80 percent of the feeling. It usually does.
The patio wall is the one worth spending on
Here is where small Denver homes leave the most value on the table. That back wall with a single swinging door and one sad window is doing almost nothing for you. It blocks light, it blocks flow, and it makes your kitchen feel like a hallway. Trade it for a wall of glass that folds completely out of the way, and your interior square footage effectively doubles the moment the weather cooperates. That is the move I would make before touching a single interior wall. Something like 4 panel folding doors turns a dead wall into a 10 or 12 foot opening that stacks to the side, and suddenly your kitchen, your patio, and your yard read as one room instead of three.
Denver is built for this. We get enough dry, bright days that outdoor living is not a fantasy, it is most of the calendar. A covered patio with a good heater and a wide folding door is genuinely usable from March through October, and on a sunny January afternoon too if you are stubborn like me. Two things to get right. First, confirm the header above the opening can carry the span, because folding panels are heavier than they look. Second, think about where the panels stack. You need a clear wall segment for them to land against, and if you forget that, you will be moving a bookshelf for the rest of your life.
A practical weekend checklist
Do these before you call anybody.
- Measure every doorway in your main living space. Write the numbers down, including the trim.
- Pick the two rooms you most want to connect. Not three. Two.
- Check which walls are exterior and which carry the second floor. Your basement or crawlspace will usually tell you.
- Watch the sun for one full day. Find out where the good light lands in the morning and where it dies in the afternoon.
- Price the flooring patch before you price the demolition. It has killed more projects than permits have.
That last one is not a joke. I have seen a couple abandon a wall removal because matching a discontinued 1970s oak was going to cost more than the structural work.
What to expect on cost and timeline
Interior doorway widening is a small job. A good carpenter can have it framed, patched, and painted in a couple of days, and you will wonder why you waited five years. Exterior replacements run longer, mostly because of the order window and the inspection, not because the install is slow. Most of these systems go in over a few days once the unit arrives.
Permits are the variable nobody can predict for you. Denver has gotten more serious about energy performance in recent years, and the Department of Energy publishes the baseline guidance most local codes lean on for glazing and insulation values. Budget time for that review rather than assuming a same week approval.
Here is my stance, and you can take it or leave it. Spend your money on the wall that faces outside. Interior openings are great, but they do not add light, they just redistribute it. An exterior opening adds light and square footage at once, and it is the only change on this list that a buyer will notice in the first ten seconds of a showing.
What you actually get when it is done
I asked my neighbor what changed after she opened up her back wall. She said the house got quieter. Not literally. It just stopped feeling like a collection of rooms you move between and started feeling like one place you live in. That is the real return. Not resale, not a magazine photo. You get to cook dinner while the dog runs in the yard and the kids do homework at the same table where you eat. Small homes are not a compromise when the walls cooperate. They are efficient. So start with the notepad tonight. Mark the shuffle spots. Then go stand in front of your back wall and ask yourself what that wall is actually doing for you. If the answer is nothing, you already know your first project.