Renovation | It's Great To Be Home

The Flip: The Master Bathroom, Then & Now

January 20, 2011 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 26 Comments

We’re nearing the end of our tour of the flip! I must admit, I’m a little sad. :)

So far we’ve seen the great room (staging sources here), the dining room (staging sources here), the jack ‘n jill bathroom, the laundry room and the master bedroom (staging sources here) – so of course it’s time for the master bathroom!!

When we bought the house we could tell that the master bathroom had lots of potential since it was pretty large, but the layout was terrible and incredibly choppy. The space was split into 6 rooms!!

You can see the original layout of the master bathroom in the floor plan below – 3 closets, a “wet room” with the shower/tub and toilet, a room with the sinks, and another room with a makeup vanity. Talk about choppy!

To take full advantage of the footprint of the master bathroom, all of the walls had to come out (except the shell of the 2 connected closets, which were combined into 1). The makeup vanity turned into another closet, and the original third closet turned into a huge walk-in shower! (See how we came up with the new layout here).

Take a look for yourself at how it all turned out.

After the great room, I’m most envious of this bathroom (in particular the jetted tub). What are your favorite features?

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: The Great Room, Then & Now

January 4, 2011 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 80 Comments

We did it!! We reached the finish line and our old pal the flip is now on the market and FOR SALE!! Cue the confetti and streamers. :)

Now that every inch of the flip has been fluffed and puffed beyond all measure, I think it’s high time to see how far it’s come over the past 3 months!

Without a doubt, the great room underwent the biggest transformation. It was a gigantic undertaking to figure out how to combine four different rooms (den, kitchen, breakfast room & enclosed patio), get the vaulted ceiling figured out, fix the flow of the kitchen, and a billion other things.

Here’s how the great room looks now:

And here’s a reminder of how these four rooms (that we combined) looked when we bought the house on September 29, 2010:

What do you think?

This room gave us the most headaches during the renovation, just trying to figure out how to make the most of this gigantic space, but in the end I think it’s the room that most buyers will fall in love with.

Maybe I’m being sentimental, but I can just imagine an entire family hanging out in this room, kids doing homework at the kitchen table while the dad reads his newspaper at the peninsula and the mom whips up something tasty for dinner. Can you see it?