I spent a little time over the weekend between: door shopping, baby kissing& tickling, looking at paint swatches and sitting on sofas to draw our old floor plan and share our new floor plan. I'm a very visual personal, so hopefully this gives your better visual our the plans we are making to our home I mentioned a few weeks back in this post.
Here's our floor plan of our house, typically smallish 1950's rancher. I drew and scanned this floor plan so its much lighter than in person. I Loved our old floor plan, but it needed and update that made sense.
Here's our new floor plan, much improved over the original layout our home. I'm drawn to houses where the main living areas (living room / kitchen dining rooms etc) are in the front of the house, since our home is laid out that way its much trickier to do additions where it makes sense. Meaning we didn't want to an addition that would throw our house off just to gain a little more living space so it made the most sense to do a master bathroom addition and laundry room addition.
Here's a reminder of the minor changes we are making to our homes floor plan
Minor Changes
- Enlarge doorway between Living / Dining & Kitchen
- Rearrange Linen closet layout - faces hallway now
- Remove Master Bedroom Closet - creating a nook area
- Replace sliding glass doors in Nursery with a pair of windows
- Replace double closet door in Nursery with single closet door
- Enlarge Main bathroom window, let more natural light in
Our thought process on Minor Changes
We knew that enlarging the door way between the living room and dining / kitchen would make our home feel more open and give our home better flow. We also decided to move our small linen closet and face it forward for easy access. Next we decided to remove the sliding glass door we never like in the nursery and replace it with a pair of windows. I'm not a fan of sliding closet doors specifically in kids rooms, so those were we replaced with a single closet door. The reach in closet is really small, so this change won't affect anything. In our main bathroom we decided to go with a bigger window to let more natural light in and give the appearance or a wider room.
Big Changes
- Update Kitchen layout from 'L Shape' to 'U Shape' kitchen
- Remove hallway closet (makes the kitchen & main bathroom larger)
- Flip Plumbing in Hallway bathroom (swap toilet and vanity layout)
- Laundry / Mudroom Addition
- Create access to backyard from inside house (with out using a bedroom access)
- Push Garage forward 5ft for laundry room addition (more details soon)
- Master Bathroom / Walk-in Closet Addition
- Add French Doors in Master bedroom that lead to backyard
- Widen Garage door from 8ft to 10f
Our Thought Process Big Changes
These are the super happy cartwheel inducing changes! We did a lot of thinking about our homes layout, seriously an insane amount and knew that more efficient
space for our family of four (five when you count out four legged family member Mojo) was a must. That's way we decided to upgrade from a 'L Shape' Kitchen layout to a 'U Shape' kitchen layout, this change is huge! Thanks to our new and improved layout we'll have more counter space / storage space and our fridge will no longer 'float' on the wall.
We were able to make this design improvement by removing our hallway coat closet, this change also made our bathroom larger. We gained an additional 4+ square feet in room in the kitchen and main bathroom, for a small house to gain space by making tweak its HUGE! Trust me HUGE! Another change we made in our main bathroom was flipping the plumbing, basically we swapped the vanity & toilet layout. I always hated the vanity next to the bath tub, so I'm happy about this change and now we can fit a much larger vanity in our bathroom. Our vanity was once 24 inches now we have room for 60 inches -- that's five feet of counter space happiness!!
Before our floor plan changes we were only able access the backyard from Nursery which we hated or going thought the garage to the backyard, which we hated when we had parties trust me it sucks. That's how the laundry room / mudroom idea came about, we an indoor laundry room that's part of our house we'll now be able to access our backyard though the laundry room! I'm really excited about this change and I'll share more details about this new space soon along with my design ideas :) Another change we are making is the master bedroom bathroom / closet addition that includes french doors, I'll share more about the design etc soon. For now the floor plan gives an idea on how it will look. Lastly and I'm sure there are many small changes I might have left out but i'll get to all that in due time. Anyways we widen our garage opening from the teeny tiny 8ft garage door to a normal and safer 10ft wide garage door.
Whew, so many changes!! Each time I stop by our home, I get happy to see all of ideas slowing coming to fruition, its a good feeling and so very hard to describe. Just picture me with a perma grin on my face :)
Let me know if you have any questions about our changes, I'd be happy to answer them. Are there any small or big changes you plan on making to your home's layout in the future? I'd lvoe to hear.
