house renovation – the plans

Now that you’ve seen the full blown “before” of our house, (level 1 and level 2), it’s finally time to show what we’re planning on, and now in the progress of, doing. Both B and I have been thinking about this since last April and we’ve definitely run the gamut of options on what to do with the house. At one point we were even adding on to the back, but after getting estimates and realizing how much money it would cost for adding not that much square footage, we decided we needed to stick with the original footprint.

Before making any decision we had to see it in 3d, so I made a handy little model that is accurate down to the 1/4″ of our house. It’s been pushed and pulled and manipulated in every which way. Bedrooms have become bathrooms, the kitchen has flipped one way and then flipped back. But now I think its set. Well it better be because we’re moving on it! Here is what we finally decided on.

If you didn’t already figure out in the first floor before post about my disdain for that half bath sticking out in the kitchen, let me spell it out for you: that half bath sticking out in the kitchen has got. to. go. However, it would not be very smart of us to completely eliminate a half bath from the house especially since we would eventually like to sell it, and we need a place to do laundry. So first order of business when designing our new space was not only eliminating that half bath sticking out of the kitchen, but also finding better places for each of those pieces.

We’re putting that half bath under the stair and nixing that “open to the back wall” feature of the kitchen. Filling in that wall also gives us more space for kitchen cabinets. The laundry is going upstairs which we’ll talk about soon. But first let’s just look at how much better this kitchen is without that room in there

Here’s what is was:

and here’s what it will be:

Side note, we’re most likely NOT having green chairs, I was just having fun putting furniture in my 3d model. Second side note: Lucy is not in the after only because she was a little difficult to model. There will be a little dog roaming around this new kitchen as well.

Since we’re losing that closet under the stair, we’ll get some high cabinets against the back exterior wall which will be the pantry/place-to-put-the-vacuum. That black wall, (which I actually don’t know what color its going to be yet) is the new, more streamlined, “bump-out” to accommodate that duct going up to the office, but now we have a legitimate eat-in kitchen. I want to do some fun pendant light over that table to really help define it as a dining area.

View from the living room before:

and after:

Look how far back you can see! All the way to the other end of the house! And the kitchen now has two windows! That door next to the brick wall is the new half bath off the living room. I still can’t believe that this is actually happening.

Onto the second floor:

We decided to move the laundry upstairs because that’s where almost all of the laundry is made anyway. So we’re tearing out our closet and rebuilding it bigger with room for a stackable washer and dryer. Yes, it does make the bedroom a bit smaller, but it’s still a pretty good size given that the house isn’t even 1,100 square feet. Plus, now we’re going to have a walk in closet.

The second floor isn’t modeled to quite the detail as the first. So overview shots will hopefully suffice. We’re going to put a barn door over the new closet opening so we don’t have a door swinging into the now smaller bedroom. All of our hollow, flat slab doors are going to be replaced with solid 5-panel doors with new hardware.

As far as the bathroom, the plumbing fixtures are getting replaced, but will be in the same place; however, we’re moving the wall out and switching up how you access that weird hallway closet. Getting to it from the hallway like before just wasn’t working because of the sloped floor. So instead, we’re adding built-in storage across from the toilet.

Moving the door out makes the bathroom a bit bigger and the door will now open into a wall rather than right in front of the shower. Plus now we have room to get a little bit wider tub which is going to feel way more luxurious.

I’ll go through each room in more detail in upcoming posts, but now you have the plans. And this is not some “wouldn’t it be nice if we did this” because this is happening right now. Our house is completely torn to shreds, walls are down, heck, ceilings are down. We’re doing this. For real.

Hope you’re excited!