Michelle Obama on East Wing demolition: 'We always felt it was the people's house'

Michelle Obama is speaking out publicly for the first time about President Trump's demolition of the East Wing to build a new ballroom at the White House, saying she never thought of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as belonging to the first family.

"People have asked me how I felt about the move," Obama said during a Tuesday appearance on CBS's "The Late Show" when asked by host Stephen Colbert about the East Wing being torn down.

"What I will remind people is that house is not our house," Obama said.

"We never viewed it as our house. We were there for a time. We had a job to do," the former first lady said.

"We always felt it was the people's house," Obama, 61, continued.

"And yes, every family, every administration, has a right and a duty to maintain the house, make investments and improvements. And there are plenty of things that needed fixing there," she told Colbert.

"But the thing — it makes me confused. I am confused by what are our norms? What are our standards? What are our traditions?" Obama said.

"I just feel like, what is important to us as a nation anymore? Because I'm lost," she said. 

During President Obama's time in office from 2009-17, Michelle Obama said, there were "a whole standard of norms and rules that we follow to a T, that we painstakingly tried to uphold, because it was bigger than us."

The country, she said, must "decide what rules are we following and who is to abide by them, and who isn't. I am lost, and I hope that more Americans feel lost in a way that they want to be found again, because it's up to us to find what we're losing."

Obama's remarks come after crews demolished the East Wing of the White House last month to construct Trump's planned $300 million ballroom. 

Trump, who has said that the 90,000-square-foot ballroom will be built with private donations, told reporters in October that the East Wing had to be razed in order to "properly" complete the construction project.

During her "Late Show" interview, when Colbert mentioned the East Wing, Obama quipped, "Remember that?"

Obama described the East Wing, built in 1942 during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency and which provided space for the first lady's staff as well as other offices, as "where life happened."

"The West Wing was work — sometimes it was sadness, it was problems. It was the guts of the White House," Obama, author of the new book "The Look," said.

"The East Wing was where you felt light."