I'm just going to preface this post by giving you my excuse for why this post has taken soooooo long. You'd think the floor plan would have been one of my first posts. Especially since anyone who knows me knows that the first thing I did when we looked at this house was take measurements and draw it out in CAD (as I have done for literally every house/apartment/room I have ever lived in.
I know. I'm a geek.) But
because of my floor-plan-geekiness, I didn't want to post something until I was happy with how it looked. Which meant no not-to-scale single-line renditions. So I tried to plot it from CAD, but it never looked right. So I then I tried modeling the whole house in SketchUp, which failed. Several times. And then I got mad and said a lot of cuss words while restraining myself from throwing things. And then I quit. For months.
Finally, I tried again. I kept it simple this time so that I could show you guys what we have going on. I'll save my attempts to do a full interior/exterior model for the future. I do want to figure that out eventually so I can mock up the exterior changes we want to make down the line, but for blog purposes, we'll keep it simple for now. So without further ado... the floor plan!
Let's start with the "as purchased" plans:
We've got about 770 square feet on the first floor, and when the 2nd floor is all built out we'll have about 1500 square feet total. So it's not a huge house, but plenty of space for the two of us and the dogs. And as you can see, there are NO closets on the 1st floor. Overall we're severely lacking in storage.
Onward and upward, here are what I am referring to as the "Phase 1" plans:
Here is a break down of the major changes:
- We tore down the wall between the kitchen and dining room to allow for a slightly larger kitchen (basically the room needed to add a dishwasher)
- We opened up the wall between the living room and the stairs /office
- We stole some space from the little nook in the garage to do a built-in closet for first-floor storage
- We removed the old stairs down to the basement and added a hatch in the floor with a ladder for interior access. (We have external access via the bilco doors at the back of the house so we really didn't need a second basement stairway.)
- We built the new office wall about 12" into the room from the original wall, which will allow us to expand the bathroom when we redo that space down the line. (I envision an old clawfoot tub in front of the window and a lot more floor space.)
We have some additional things we want to do down the line (phases 2-5 ought to keep us busy for a good number of years), but these are the first things we are trying to accomplish. Someday we would like to tear down the existing garage and build a new semi-detached garage connected to the dining room via an entry/ mudroom. We don't ever use the front porch (everyone who comes over enters through the garage), so it would be nice to have a more inviting "welcome" to visitors than walking through our mess of a garage. Although, admittedly, it will be much easier to navigate once the kitchen cabinets are no longer hogging all the space, haha.
So there it is folks! Long overdue, but better late than never, right!?
