BEFORE (CURRENT)
The main issues we wanted to address:
- Better kitchen layout, remove the peninsula
- Defined living and dining spaces in the "great room" (shown as the family room), with a vaulted ceiling and more light
- Larger master bed and bath, larger master closet
- No formal dining room
- A less cluttered hallway: currently there are 7 doors and several switches, knobs and vents in a very small area!
FUTURE
After a few productive rounds of design ideas and iterations, we arrived at the near-final layout. In the new design, new construction is depicted by solid black walls.
Here are the highlights, from walking in the front door:
- The dining room becomes a study with french doors (currently depicted as swinging doors, but we'll make the pocket doors).
- The entry foyer gets a curved wall to connect to the bedroom corridor, removing one of the closets/doors that cluttered things up.
- Instead of a hallway linen closet, we'll turn half of the space into an outward-facing niche for art or bookshelves, and the other half will face inward and become shelves in the second bathroom (more clutter avoided!).
- Down the bedroom corridor, the entrances to the 2 spare bedrooms will be pushed back to create a square landing area in the hallway, creating more space and less constrained feel to the narrow hall.
- The far right spare bedroom will have a new closet built, in order to give back the existing closet to the master bedroom closet, to create 1 large walk-in. The resulting spare bedroom will still be 11x11, plenty of room for a bed and/or home office.
- The master bedroom gets a 12'x14' addition pushed out the back wall, creating a setting area and large windows onto the back yard. There is also an 8' sliding glass door that opens onto a newly created courtyard patio, bordered on the opposite side by the existing living room.
- The master bath also pushes out about 3' to create a large shower, and some re-arranging of the toilet behind a wall to create privacy and more room at the double vanity.
- In the kitchen, the shared wall with the laundry room moves 2-3' toward the garage to create a wider kitchen and more narrow laundry room (a great tradeoff). This is really the only wall that is moving significantly (which keeps unplanned costs in check, we hope!).
- The resulting kitchen space allows for 3'x6' island for seating along one side. The kitchen layout will be refined with a kitchen designer soon; placement of appliances and cabinets may change.
- A defined dining area emerges in the great room with built-in cabinets along the wall shared with the mechanical closet. This would be a great chance for upper cabinets with glass and a counter that serves as a sideboard when entertaining. (We thought about a wet bar and wine refrigerator under cabinet here, but it seems like we wouldn't practically use those things at that spot. We hope to incorporate a wine fridge in the main kitchen, though!)
- To define the dining and living room spaces, Bruce suggests 2' walls on either side of the line that separates them visually.
- In the living room, we add a new 8' sliding glass door on the right side, mirroring the existing slider on the left which opens onto the existing patio. The new sliding door will open onto the newly created courtyard patio, for great traffic flow (and air flow too).
- Though not pictured in the 2-D floor plan view, the ceiling in the living/dining room will be pushed up to about 12' with a course of windows above both sliding glass doors, with a vaulted tray design. We are thinking about skylights, possibly, too.
- The back wall of the living room will be the focal wall, with a fire place that has floor to ceiling tile or stone with a new gas insert, as it's currently a wood burning box. We'd like to have built-in cabinets and shelves on either side of the fireplace.
Hopefully these changes will be underway soon, we are excited to get into the project!
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