Unbeknownst to us, we started building a life together in September 2011 when our paths crossed in our neighborhood park, Midwood Park. Alex was playing basketball and I was walking a friend's dog. We were the only two in the park. We had met on previous occasions, but this serendipitous meeting was different. Special. We ended up spending the whole day together, the first of many.
After getting engaged, we started thinking about where we wanted to live long term. Charlotte wasn't in question, but the neighborhood and home were. Sheridan has been a great place to live, but we both agreed it wasn't what we wanted forever. We looked at lots of homes in lots of neighborhoods and kept coming back to the house Alex lived in when we met. The house on the park. The park that we love. It wasn't for sale, but we contacted Alex's old landlords and, after some back and forth, landed on a selling price. In June 2014, it was ours.
We were thrilled to have the house due to its location, but knew it was too small for the family we envisioned. We rented it out on Airbnb to help cover the mortgage while we figured out our plans. We spent six months working with an architect, meeting with contractors, and closing on a construction loan. We've finally moved from planning to execution!
The plan we settled on more than doubles square footage of the house. The yellow highlighted section below represents the original structure.
As you can see, the plan includes an updated front porch, a larger kitchen and dining/sunroom, a great room, a master suite, and a covered back porch. The original living room, office, two bedrooms, and bathroom will get some upgrades, but no major renovations.
There are so many decisions to make when planning addtion. My worst fear is investing all of this time, money, and energy in this project and then spending the next 20+ years wishing we had planned the addition differently... Deep breath. We're trying to take this one decision at a time.
With that in mind, we do need to make final framing decisions immediately. There are a five things I'm questioning. Please weigh in!
After getting engaged, we started thinking about where we wanted to live long term. Charlotte wasn't in question, but the neighborhood and home were. Sheridan has been a great place to live, but we both agreed it wasn't what we wanted forever. We looked at lots of homes in lots of neighborhoods and kept coming back to the house Alex lived in when we met. The house on the park. The park that we love. It wasn't for sale, but we contacted Alex's old landlords and, after some back and forth, landed on a selling price. In June 2014, it was ours.
We were thrilled to have the house due to its location, but knew it was too small for the family we envisioned. We rented it out on Airbnb to help cover the mortgage while we figured out our plans. We spent six months working with an architect, meeting with contractors, and closing on a construction loan. We've finally moved from planning to execution!
The plan we settled on more than doubles square footage of the house. The yellow highlighted section below represents the original structure.
As you can see, the plan includes an updated front porch, a larger kitchen and dining/sunroom, a great room, a master suite, and a covered back porch. The original living room, office, two bedrooms, and bathroom will get some upgrades, but no major renovations.
There are so many decisions to make when planning addtion. My worst fear is investing all of this time, money, and energy in this project and then spending the next 20+ years wishing we had planned the addition differently... Deep breath. We're trying to take this one decision at a time.
With that in mind, we do need to make final framing decisions immediately. There are a five things I'm questioning. Please weigh in!
- Currently, the washer and dryer are located in a hall closet in the original part of the house. Initially, we thought leaving it there was the best decision. Friends with families have commented that we will probably wish we had a laundry room rather than a laundry closed.
- The new half bath is a bit bigger than necessary - almost the same size as the full bath in the original part of the house. What if we move the washer and dryer into this space instead?
- We still want to land with 2 1/2 bathrooms - so if we went changed the planned half bath to a laundry room, then we would need to take part of the master closet for the half bath. This would also result in four doors in the kitchen/great room open area - is that going to look funny? Will we have enough closet space if we do this?
- We will have vaulted ceilings in the bedroom. We originally asked for a partial wall here to close the bed space off from the rest of the master suite. Our thinking is this would help if one of us is up moving around while the other is still sleeping. We still like the idea of a partition, but think we could do something less permanent and more artsy than a wall. So, the thought is to remove this little wall.
- We had visions of having a little private porch accessed off the master. The more we look at the drawing the more it seems unnecessary to access the shared (not private) porch from the master. So - door or no door to the porch from the master bedroom?
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