Our Renovation Floor Plan
Our kitchen island soon after the plumbing was hooked up!
Welcome back! In reality I need to welcome myself back to my blog because it's been so long since I've been here. Full disclosure - I've had a major aversion to the thought of blogging about our house progress for almost a year now. The whole process has been so consuming that spending any additional time on it, even to show major progress, has been too overwhelming. I even put off documenting the foundation work in my last post for a while and then backdated it somewhat closer to the time it actually happened. I was anticipating posting all the major steps since then, but as we see, that clearly didn't happen!
Compounding my guilt about neglecting my blog has been the fact that my sweet and talented friend Olivia created a logo and brand new website for me LAST FALL, which I absolutely love and have yet to put to use! I have some holes to fill in before I'm ready to switch to the new site, and have had zero motivation to do it in the midst of everything else going on. I'm so excited to show you her work when I can get my act together!
That picture above might be one reason why I've been a little unmotivated for at least the past few months :) Baby Hymel is due December 9, and we find out the gender this coming Monday!! I can't wait!
I wanted to show you all the floor plan we ended up with for our addition/renovation. The photo below shows our original house and the demo plan our architects created for us. All the dashed lines are walls that were demoed (or originally planned to be - you can see in my blue edits that some plans changed).
I'm now writing from our bright and very comfortable new living room! We are SO happy with the outcome of this project and really enjoy our house every day, but it has definitely been a different experience than moving back into a brand new, completely ready-to-enjoy home like we see on TV...or like jobs I have worked on where the clients live somewhere else until all is done. Six weeks was the longest we wanted to be out of our house, and only so much can get done in that timeframe. I had to push our contractors consistently during that time to accomplish what we did - drywall, hardwoods, cabinets and paint. We often had two groups in the house at the same time, sometime in each other's way.
The day drywall went up!
It was still so exciting to move back in after major progress happened in a relatively short period. But, our master bathroom and closet were still a shell and our kitchen and laundry room were non-functioning (other than cabinetry). Since then we've spent most of our weekends on house projects - though the list is ever-decreasing! - so the gratification has been more of a gradual stream of small joys rather than one big moment.
Below is the original floor plan we landed on with our architects. At the time, we were planning to do a set of stairs to go up to our attic space, which we wanted to build out as a second floor in the future.
After we got some bids from builders for this plan, we realized we were going to have to make some big changes or not do the project at all. This is when we spent a couple months debating, looking into moving, and eventually decided to GC the project ourselves. We also refined the plan by deleting the stairs, changing some doors and windows and other minor adjustments. Below is our final floor plan!
The only major things that differ from what we actually did is the side stoop and the deck, which Jon just finished this past weekend. The deck floor actually extends out to where our master bedroom ends, and we have a single set of stairs running perpendicular rather than straight out into the yard as shown here. The stairs at the new side door now run along the side of the house toward the front door.
Here's what our deck looked like last night at our 4th of July cookout, the first party we've hosted in the new house! It's been so nice to have a covered deck this time so we can have some shade in this miserable heat we've been getting. Hope you all had a great 4th!