Basement Layout

The basement. Oh, the basement. It's a sad excuse for additional living area right now, but thankfully there isn't much to deal with down there except taking out the existing drop ceiling and removing the icky tile floor. Both projects are on the docket for this coming weekend and the following weekend as well, so hopefully we can clear it out so the builder can start!

The plan is for the builder to frame it up for drywall, insulate the walls & ceiling, have lighting and drywall installed, then everything will be painted and finally, we will have carpet installed. We plan to use our existing furniture, so that part is "free", per se. The plan is to put use our current sofa, chair & ottoman,  sofa table & end table, plus our media stand and television. This is also the only room in the house that has any sort of measurable wall space, so we plan to put many of our large family photos that we currently have framed on the walls.

Honestly, we are not sure if we're going to hang out downstairs, but we hope we do, since it's a lot of living space, that is currently not utilized. I imagine having movie night down there, and also being able to have Eames play down there with his friends, eventually. Eames has TONS of toys in his room, and we'd like to avoid that as much as possible in the new house. We also don't have many "large" toys, since our current home is miniscule. So any of those he accumulates can go down there.

There are two rooms and they seem to be the exact footprint from the rooms above - living room, dining room & kitchen. The larger room is also home to our water heater and furnace, which will be walled in once they frame it out. The back room will be a laminate floor, which we took out of the upstairs kitchen, and Greg will be building shelving for storage. You will also note that under the stairs, is our well - yep, the house's well is INSIDE the house, which was a foreign concept to both Greg and I. It is not being used right now, as we recently hooked up to city water, but we plan to use it to water our lawn.

That's about it down here - it's not huge, but with the open staircase from upstairs, we hope this area is a lot more inviting, and that we use it as a family room for relaxing and playing.

Bedrooms & Bathrooms Plans

Certainly not as much fun as our kitchen & living room renderings, however, still exciting to have it laid our like we'd like it, I share with you the bedroom & bath layout ideas. I walked through this with one of the builders we are considering just yesterday and he thinks it will work well, which is always great to hear when you think it will fit, but just not sure.

There are three bedrooms and there will be two baths. Originally, there was one large bathroom with laundry room inside the bath, and a closet with mirrored doors in our bedroom, but that will become two much smaller bathrooms, and one walk in closet for us. The laundry room will be moving into the garage, which I will do my best to explain in a later post of how that will work.

Although I love a nice, hot shower, Greg and I do not spend a lot of time in the bathroom, so large baths were not important to us in this house. We also are making our master bedroom a few feet smaller, to accommodate a larger master closet. We are in the mindset that less furniture = less clutter/less dusting, and having all of our clothes, including our folded items such as socks & pajamasin the closet is ideal for us.

We are currently not "TV in the bedroom" people, but are considering it in this house for various reasons. I have one in the floor plan, but took it out in the 3D drawings below.


So, here is the basic layout of the back of the home. The hallway leading to this portion of the house is right by the door that leads into the garage now (and it will soon lead into a narrow laundry room, which will open into the garage).

Our patio wraps around the entire home, which is one of the reasons we loved this house, and you can access it through our room, plus the sliders in the three season room. Those strange squares in the hallway are skylights, which we will be keeping, and the master closet/bathroom will only be accessible though our room. There will be a built in linen closet in the guest/kid bath, but not in ours - we didn't want to take up the space, and will keep our towels & bedding in our own closet, since we're making it larger anyway.

Eames will have the bedroom with the two windows, and we will set the other with a guest bed & our desk, which will hold my work items. The closet in the guest room will also hold all of my work items, which is exactly how I store everything in our current house; in the guest bedroom's closet.



And here is a three dimensional view from the rear of the house. I put a slider in our bedroom, but really those are just large windows that are stationary. The door is directly to the left of those. You will see the opening into our closet - there will be no door into the closet, just a walkway, and there will be a pocket door into our bath.



Here is a better view of the two other bedrooms. Enough space to play and sleep, but not too much where we collect a lot of crap in our rooms. We are excited!

And here's a view of the bathrooms & our closet. We have decided on narrow, custom vanities to fit the space perfectly. We aren't quite sure on sinks yet, but have decided on double vanities for both bedrooms, which means we are buying four sinks and four faucets - which didn't really occur to me until I was looking at them last night online. OY! 

And that random glass-brick wall is an old doorway that used to go out to the sideyard, but has been boarded up for the past 20 years. Since you can tell on the outside that it used to be a door, we decided to glass block it for two reasons - a.) we needed a window in that room anyway, and b.) since the outside is Roman brick, which we don't have any more of, I didn't want to try and "patch" the outside and put a window on the upper half. So, instead, we're going to make it a glass brick wall. Fabulous.

We are going to do a standard cast iron tub like this one in the kid bath, and pop another wall in there to make it sit in the alcove. We have adorable hexagon tile that will surround the bath - it may be my favorite tile ever! In our bath, we are doing just a standing shower in between the walls, with a glass door that faces the room. Since Greg and I never use the bathroom at the same time except to brush our teeth, we didn't need a ton of space in here, and the pocket door will save a bit of space (vs. a standard door swing), and be just what we need to keep the light out of our bedroom.k

Living, Dining & Kitchen Floor Plans

When we initially walked through the house, there were many changes that were obvious - take down the wall that was added on in the 70's, take out the "open" office that was the first thing you saw when you walked in the door, and make the ridiculously large bathroom into two normal sized baths, one being a master closet & bathroom.

The more time we've spent there doing demolition, the more projects we've come up with, and the more we've decided how we *think* we are going to use the space. It's actually quite fun spending weekends there dreaming of how we will eventually use our space, while taking down double layers of drywall (not joking...).

You've seen the before tour, so now I share with you the "before construction plans". I am sure it will not turn out like this 100%, but it's our starting point. And if you've never used FloorPlanner.com, what a fun little tool to create rooms to scale! You will need to use your imagination a bit, but here goes...



This is the layout we have decided on. The living room is on the left (which is the south side of the house) will be where we hang out. There is a fabulous sectional sofa & matching (giant!) ottoman already in place (a Black Friday deal we couldn't pass up!), and I actually picked up some lampshades that I really like last week. Other than the sectional, we won't need much furniture - it's going to be perfect.

The dining room is right near the front door, and the fireplace is between both of these spaces. We picked up our table & chairs set at an estate sale and it fits in this space perfectly - we are SO excited to be able to have people over for dinner now. Just to the right of the front door is currently a tiny bathroom. We are taking it out completely for a little entry area, since there isn't one already, and then opening up the staircase to make it seem bigger. Lots of walls coming down for this, and I'm excited to see how much larger the space feels!

The kitchen is behind the dining room, and we've decided on this layout - tons of counter space, and an island for eating, conversation and meal prep. You will notice we are going to do two sinks - one on the long counter and another in the island - I think this is my favorite add-on idea.

Okay, so this may make more sense to see it in 3-D. My FloorPlanner skills are not perfect, but here's my best shot at this point...



Here's the front of the house from the driveway. You walk in the front door (I did not put the garage on this...) and you're standing near the dining room, and almost in the kitchen. There's a pantry (tall, brown cupboard), a wall microwave/oven (this is just the oven stretched...they didn't have what I wanted!), and a fridge. The island sits in front of that, but doesn't begin until the oven starts, so there's a bit more walking space. You will also note the open staircase that goes to the basement. I LOVE THIS!



Here is the view from the back. You see the front door, dining room area, little entry area that used to be the tiny bathroom, and the open stairs that lead you down. You can see the large windows in the living room, and all the counter space in the kitchen. That large thing in the middle is the fireplace - ours is stone, but I couldn't figure out how to change it.


And here you have the southeast corner. You can see the island better, as well as the little corner that houses the cooktop and hood. We added some floating shelves over an 18" cupboard to open that corner up a bit. Still super excited about having an island, and our fireplace isn't this crazy looking, but it was the one FloorPlanner had available!