One Room Challenge: Week 2
Grace
October 10, 2019
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Just when we thought we were confident with our floor plan, our contractor pointed out something that made us reconsider everything.
If you’re just joining this adventure (hi, nice to have you!) but you might want to go back and see all of the issues with the floor plan that we thought we had addressed in this post.
Here’s a quick visual of what we are working with and what we almost went with.
Renovated Bathroom 3 is (in our contractor’s words), “the oddest shaped bathroom known to man”.
I was resistant to this feedback because I love the idea of having three bathrooms in this house and thought it was the path of least of resistance to work with what is already there. However, our contractor is not wrong. The shape of the bathroom is problematic. The space would maybe work for me—a child-sized adult—but is truly has no hope of being a practical space for most people.
The other pain point our contractor warned us about was the small kitchen. Again—I don’t mind small spaces—but when I realized that I wouldn’t be able to open the dishwasher while at the sink, I immediately jumped on getting that bigger kitchen!
Bumping the kitchen into Renovated Bathroom 3 was the easy part to figure out. Finding a new place for the bathroom was tricky.
We went through a handful of ideas before landing on a fair compromise. We eliminated the pantry to make room for a half bath, reduced the size of the master bathroom, and moved the laundry over to the side of the house with the bedrooms.
I love having laundry accessible to everyone in the house without having to walk through bedrooms or bathrooms.
The other thing that I’m so glad we changed is having fewer doors open into the Great Room. We had originally planned on having a door from the Great Room directly into the Laundry Closet as well as directly into the Master Bedroom.
We now will have a hallway with an arched opening to keep the doors to a minimum. It’ll be easier to navigate and much easier on the eyes.
The last thing I want to note is not about the layout at all—but our relationship with our contractor. When we first started interviewing professionals for the job, we told them that we were opinionated and think that we know what we want but to PLEASE stop us from doing something super weird or dumb. Laying this ground rule sounds silly but truly has already saved us from a big weird mistake and I’m sure there are more things just like this on the horizon. This entire project is a huge learning curve for us and more than anything, we want to be receptive to feedback and do the best that we can for this house.
We’ve got a bit of time before we’ll be getting in to nitty gritty of this home design, but I can already tell that we are going to be so much happier with the extra space for dancing in the kitchen.
This post was written for the Collected Eclectic blog.
Collected Eclectic was a passion project focused on recording the process as Grace and Michael van Meurer transformed their builder grade home in to something special.
124 blog posts were published between 2018 and 2021. Explore the complete Collected Eclectic archive here.
Learn more about the project here.