Floor Plan | It's Great To Be Home

The Flip: The Laundry Room, Then & Now

January 13, 2011 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 14 Comments

So far on our tour of the flip we’ve checked out the dining room, the great room and the jack ‘n jill bathroom. Next up . . . the laundry room!

It’s hard to get too excited about a laundry room, but this one actually underwent some changes that dramatically improved the flow of the house.

If you check out the floor plan below, which is how the house used to look before the renovation, you can see that the only access to the fourth bedroom used to be through the laundry room.

Isn’t that weird? I know I would feel strange sticking a kid or a guest in that room, all by their lonesome. So we decided that needed to change.

After tons of deliberation (and lots of consultation with wise folks like my mom), we figured out a way to make that crazy laundry room / 4th bedroom dilemma work out. Basically, we moved the doorway (leading from the kitchen to the laundry room) about 3 feet to the left and pushed the south wall of the 4th bedroom out about 2 feet – this gave us enough room to create kind of a vestibule or tiny hallway between the kitchen, laundry room and 4th bedroom, and eliminating all of that weirdness. Now the 4th bedroom has a proper entrance from the hallway!

We also had a closet removed from the laundry room that was accessible only from the garage – it was eating up valuable floor space that we needed after we pushed out the wall of the 4th bedroom. But we left part of one of the closet walls still standing so that you aren’t greeted by the side of the dryer as soon as you walk into the laundry room.

Anyhoo, enough explanations – here’s how the laundry room used to look as you entered from the kitchen:

And here’s how it looks now.

The garage is to the left on the other side of the partition wall, and the vestibule area is through that open door at the end of the laundry room – you can see it to the left of the cabinetry in the photo below.

And that’s how we made the 4th bedroom much more friendly, while still leaving lots of space in the laundry room!

We wanted to make sure the laundry room looked nice and was super functional, since we figured the future buyers would pretty much always use the laundry room to come in and out of their home. At least, that’s what we do. What about you?

The Flip: Drawing on the Walls

October 18, 2010 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 8 Comments

Hey peeps!! I just got back from a fab weekend trip to the Ozarks in Arkansas with my mom, aunt and sister – we hit up the War Eagle Fair (with killer hand-made goodies) and Eureka Springs (a gorgeous artists’ town). I managed to restrain myself and not buy too many things! Jason sent me photos of the progress at the flip over the weekend, and I was mighty impressed – I’ll have to share them with you later.

Anyhoo, the other day I was thinking about how my parents remodeled our house when I was little, and to me the highlight was the day that we got to draw on all the walls in our playroom before it was demolished. Crayons, markers, you name it we got to scribble with it. Ah, it was total heaven to get to do something that was normally forbidden! By the time we were finished it looked like a Crayola box had exploded all over the walls – it was awesome.

Last Wednesday we had a grown up version of the scenario I described above while discussing the plans for the master bath with our contractor. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, our discussion quickly turned into this:

Nothing makes you realize that you own a house like drawing on the walls! We sketched out different layouts, calculated measurements and got the whole master bath nailed down . . . on the wall.

What was your ultimate “I own this home and I can do what I want” moment?

The Flip: Fixing the Floor Plan

October 6, 2010 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 11 Comments

As you guys noticed last week, the flip’s existing floor plan has lots of good features . . . and just as many bad ones.

I was happy to see that the things that bugged you about the floor plan (here and here) are pretty much the same things that drove me crazy. Here are the biggest offenders:

The wall between the family room and the kitchen.
Accessing the 4th bedroom through the laundry room.
The round breakfast room (mixed feelings from you guys about that one).
The enclosed patio (mixed feelings about this one, too).
The choppy master bathroom.
The sliding doors from the master bedroom to the patio.

Luckily, we’ve come up with some key changes to the floor plan that should address all of those issues!

Drum roll, please . . . here it is!!

Can you tell what’s changed? Here, I’ll break it down for you (sorry, you might have to squint a little):

What do you think?? I’m kind of in love with it, if I do say so myself. I think the open floor plan family room / kitchen / breakfast area will be the bomb – and it will be ginormous. The master bath (if all goes according to plan) will be seriously swanky, too, and the 4th bedroom will no longer be where the bad children are sent to think about what they’ve done.

Of course, this fabulous new floor plan didn’t just happen over night. Oh no, we’ve been agonizing for weeks, bugging my mom, our contractor, and random strangers for their ideas. After the last flip Jason and I decided that we wanted our next project to have a more modern spin – hence the super open floor plan that first enticed us:

But then we realized that the house didn’t really lend itself towards being modern and that our money would be better spent bringing the enclosed patio into the square footage and solving the round breakfast nook dilemma. Hence our second round of floor plans:

This floor plan was almost there, but not quite. The master bedroom was still lacking on closets (since in this floor plan the existing closet became a shower) and the toilet wasn’t fully obscured from view like it is in our final floor plan. Bu I think we’ve got it now!

Here’s one last look just for funsies.

What do you think? Do you think we got it right?

Small Disclaimer: I can’t promise that the floor plan won’t change again – with construction we’ve just got to roll with the punches!

{ UPDATE: Demo did begin as planned yesterday! Double woohoo! I’ll tell you guys more about it later. }