Every Project Needs A Plan

I know in the last house post Zack promised demolition pics were coming. And they are! I promise.

But we thought it would be fun to first back up a little and show you the “before” floor plan of this house.

Yes, we received a floor plan of a house that was built in the 1920s.

How cool is that?

Well, if you’re Zack and I, it’s pretty much like winning the lottery!

We saw the house on a Tuesday evening (am I weird for remembering it was a Tuesday? I also remember what I was wearing, but that’s probably not important to you).

Anyway, when the current owners came to see our house that Friday (again, I’m weird for knowing the day), they brought a copy of this hand drawn floor plan that they received when they purchased the house.

Despite the fact that Zack had pretty much committed the plan to memory after walking through once (and drawn it out that night on a legal pad while stress eating pizza with me at 11PM) , we were grateful to have a firm drawing to solidify what he thought he remembered.

We spent many more late nights studying the plan and drawing the original plan into our floor plan software.

And then came the fun…. turning the plan into what is now our home.

We have this list. It’s been a running list that we’ve had for many years. It was sort of a list of hopes and wishes for the “next house”. Some of the things were musts if we were leaving the home we had loved for 11+ years and others were just things we thought would be nice to have.

The list had big things like an open kitchen/ dining room/ living room, 3 bedrooms + office space, 2 bathrooms, a larger yard, as well as smaller things like porch(es), good trees, a laundry room, and a big island in the kitchen.

Between what this house already had and what Zack could create by working his magic, we soon realized why this house found us.

It was perfect.

Or would be.

Here is the plan that we came up with. It was revised and revised to get to this point.

 

As you can see, originally our thinking was to expand the size of the house by enclosing the side porch. It didn’t take very long for us to realize two things…

1. We love a good porch so why would we give one up?

2. We really didn’t need any more square footage than we already had.

The porch stayed….

 

But that’s about it.

We changed our minds about a few other things along the way. And tweaked this or that when we felt we needed to. This is a HUGE perk of being your own contractor.

DISCLAIMER: I’m NOT suggesting you should be your own contractor on a whole house remodel. Zack really IS a contractor. We just happen to be working on our own project. (Which I’m not sure I suggest either.)

DISCLAIMER 2: Don’t go tell your contractor that I said you can change things as you go. He will hate you. And I will deny having ever said a word.

Next up: Demo. For real this time.