Homeowner Divided Her Open-Concept Living Area for Under $900

• Zenia Olivares has been customizing her New Jersey home for the last two years.
• She decided to add a partial wall to her open-concept living room to break up the space.
• Olivares said the new wall made the area more functional and aesthetically pleasing.

Zenia Olivares wasn’t a fan of the shape of her living room when she bought her home two years ago.

Olivares, 34, lives in a 1935 bungalow in New Jersey with her husband and their two dogs. She’s a full-time content creator, documenting how she has transformed her 2,800-square-foot house into the perfect home for her family on her social media pages.

“It’s got a lot of original charm,” Olivares said of her six-bedroom, three-bathroom house. “We’ve got the original Douglas fir floors and some of the original baseboard and trim, but there has evidently been a lot of stuff done to the house.”

“It was updated in the ’70s and the ’80s and in the ’90s, so there are layers upon layers of things that I’ve found just working on the house itself,” she said. “It’s like an onion.”

Olivares’ goal has been to make her home feel comfortable with vintage and transitional influences. She described her decor style as “real cozy,” saying it “feels like a hug.”

She’s transformed nearly every space of her house, telling Business Insider she knew there was one room she definitely wanted to change when they bought the house: her open-concept living room.

The open-concept living room didn’t feel right

When you enter Olivares’ home, you’re greeted by the living room, which was initially a large rectangular space. All of the other rooms in the house are nearly perfect squares, so the length of the space felt out of place to Olivares.

“The living room was too long, and it didn’t quite make sense with the layout of the house and how everything else was,” Olivares said. “It felt disconnected.”

“I thought, ‘What if I built something to separate the spaces?'” Olivares said.

She told BI she went back and forth about the idea as she and her husband continued to work on their home, as she wasn’t sure a wall would work as the house changed.

Olivares revamped her fireplace and added columns to the ceiling, but she still felt like the living room was the wrong shape.

“I tried doing furniture as a divider, but it didn’t quite work with the positioning of the door,” she said. “I couldn’t let the idea of a wall go.”

Olivares isn’t alone in her desire for separation in her home. The trend of open-concept living has become less popular in recent years, and realtors are seeing more and more people find ways to enclose rooms in their homes.

In mid-2024, Olivares decided to make her dream a reality, working with a contractor friend to build a partial wall in the middle of the living room.

Olivares used a partial wall to break the space up

Olivares knew she didn’t want to fully close off the space to the right of her front door. Instead, she decided to add a partial wall, often called a pony wall, with columns.

She told BI she wanted to keep the “open feeling” of the large room but hoped the partial wall would create division.

“I also like the idea of being able to visually frame the stairs,” she said.

Olivares and her friend worked together to add a large beam to the ceiling, to which they attached tapered columns connected to a pony wall below.

They made all the pieces themselves, also creating molding and staining the wood a darker hue that fit Olivares’ vision.

Olivares also mocked up the new wall using cardboard boxes before they started any work to ensure she liked the look, which she recommends to anyone doing a similar project.

Because she didn’t hire someone to work on her home, Olivares said adding the wall and columns only cost around $830. It also wasn’t too time-consuming; building, installing, and staining the wood took just over a week.

She said adding the column to the ceiling was the most challenging aspect of the project.

“The ceiling is original plaster, and it is not in any way level whatsoever,” Olivares said. “And it’s overhead work, so that’s going to hurt your shoulders and your back.”

“It took me and my contractor friend an entire day to get that up there and for it to look as good as we could get it,” she added.

The hard work was worth it for the final look.

Olivares loves the separate spaces

Olivares told BI she was able to bring her exact vision to life.

“I love it,” she said of the pony wall. “I smile every time I walk through the living room, and everybody has to walk through the living room to get to one side of the house or the other. It’s beautiful to look at, and it makes the spaces make sense.”

“It makes it flow,” she added. “It makes it function, and it looks right.”

The functionality the new wall brought to Olivares’ home has been a huge benefit of the addition. For instance, the wall created an area for Olivares to put her keys down when she walks through the front door.

Likewise, she placed her Christmas tree for 2024 in the corner next to her staircase, and the new wall helped to make it feel like a dedicated space.

She also plans to add a buffet bookshelf to the wall next to the stairs to make the new room feel even more intentional down the road. Looking at the wall, Olivares knows adding the barrier was the perfect choice for her home.

“Sometimes open-concept is a little too open,” she said.