Our House Floor Plan

To get a better feel for the layout of our house as we share our remolding and house projects, I created a basic floor plan model.  I will not share how many times I had to remeasure rooms and start over completely because it got embarrassingly ridiculous and I broke my tape measure in the process.  Nonetheless, I am pretty impressed with my final result, though I know Andy will complain that the dimensions are not perfect to his engineer eye.  Kiddos are waking up from nap soon, so I am calling it good enough!

First Floor:

If you have not been in our house, one thing you will notice right away from the layout is it forms a big circle.  The kids love chasing each other around the house.  I don't mind the circle, though Andy and I often find ourselves taking the "long route" to rooms.  The bathroom feels like the center of the circle and when we have guests it is always confusing whether or not to leave doors open so no one gets a surprise visit while in the bathroom.  Also, there are a million doors.  Three to the outside and countless between rooms.  Right we we moved in, we took down the door from the kitchen to the laundry and that has helped some.

Some of our thoughts/dreams for 1st floor floor-plan renovations:

• Demo wall between kitchen and dining nook (some days I find myself creeping toward Andy's shop to find a sledgehammer... the only thing stopping us now is Andy has to deal with the load bearing issue and then we have to deal with new flooring)
• Widen doorway from kitchen to living room
• Add an addition to make the dining area as wide as the living room
• Put a barn door or pocket door from laundry to bathroom for more laundry room lay-out options

2nd Floor:

On the first floor, the master bedroom and kids' playroom are and addition so the upstairs is only above the original part of the house.  The room sizes are pretty good.  The big issue here is E's room is an attic conversion so when you walk from the hallway to her room you step down into it.  We call it the hobbit room because the door going into it is so little.  Our first big demo happened up here- The office nook was originally a large, useless closet (with mildew).  Andy opened it up to create a space for an office desk and computer.  He also widened the doorway to the craft nook and took down the floor to ceiling wall next to the stairs going to Esther's hallway.  It is much lighter and more open up here now and it looks less like attic space.

Some of our thoughts/dreams for 2nd floor floor-plan renovations:

• Tear down E's walls (evicting the mice we hear running around there) and insulate and drywall
• Put in dormer windows in E's room
• Put 3rd bedroom addition over porch area (next to E's room)
• Put master bedroom/bathroom addition over downstairs playroom/bedroom (this is probably a never happen, but it is nice to dream!)