0 In Our House

Our Renovation Plans

When I left you with the news that we were adding on to our house, we had just started working on the actual addition itself. If you follow me on instagram, you may have noticed a few posts here and there and in my stories about our process.

As some of you may know, we’re tackling this addition all by ourselves, with the help of family and friends when we need more manpower. This is, of course, not your usual DIY. And not something I would recommend for the average person to take on. Jay (hubs), is a general contractor by trade and this is pretty much his day job, while I have a lot of background (compared to the average individual) in the construction trade. So for the most part, I’d like to think we know what we’re digging ourselves into 😉 As I had mentioned in my previous post, we knew we’d be building something onto this house at one point or another, but we weren’t sure what it was going to be.

existing layout

Our house is essentially a shoe box. It’s just a small rectangular house, with two bedrooms + one bath that’s just shy of 1000 sq/ft (plus basement). As much as we’ve loved living in a smaller house, now that there are 6 of us, and that the kids are older, we decided to that needed to make room. The girls currently share a bedroom on the main level, and the boys share a bedroom in the basement. While Jay and I take up the second main level bedroom.

Our living space is tight and cramped with that many people hanging out in there on a movie night, god forbid we decide to invite friends over the adults either go outside or we force the kids into the basement (which has a family room that isn’t well layed out at the moment). So in all reality, not ideal. We’re also having the same issue with the dining area. We’ve fit in the biggest table we can, which sits 6 comfortably, and we’ve crammed a few more in there we needed to but ultimately, it’d be nice to have a table to comfortably host dinners with friends and/or family without needing to cram children in a bench seating area or serving dinner twice.

And one bathroom! You don’t realize how nice a second bathroom is until someone is using that one bathroom and you can’t get in there with a toddler who needs to pee AT THAT MOMENT. This one is pretty self explanatory haha.

first floor

Once we decided that we’d be going up rather then out with our addition, we know we needed to make a wishlist of items that were musts and things we’d like but could be chopped off if need be. Here is the list we came up with:

  • a garage space This was an absolute must! Whatever we were doing, it had to include a garage, which was one of the driving factors behind our decision to go up. The garage needed to be as wide as we could, with the possibility of fitting two cars and a mudroom area.
  • large dinner area I’d like to be able to fit a larger dinning table so we can actually host people over, minimum a 6 seater table.
  • bedrooms for everyone Ideally we wanted to be able to give everyone in the family a bedroom space (with the boys sharing if we couldn’t make it happen).
  • a proper master We were really hoping we could fit in a proper master en-suite for ourselves. A walk-in closet was a luxury we weren’t sure we’d be able to fit in, but as long as we had one decent sized closet with a bathroom we were good to go.
  • upstairs laundry This was a wishlist item, and I honestly didn’t think we’d be able to fit it in.
  • sewing/office space If we were moving everything upstairs I was hoping we’d be able to find space on the main floor to have an office or sewing space, if not, I definitely wanted to have a separate space somewhere in the house to put it.
  • maximize storage Whatever we were doing for floorplan, it had to allow for a lot of storage!!!
second floor

As you can see in these layouts, we were able to fit almost everything we wanted into the addition and the new layout of the first floor. All the bedrooms will be moved to the second floor, with the addition of a family bathroom and, what I’m most excited for, a second floor laundry (because my people create a LOT of dirty clothes). Plus we actually had enough space for a full master en-suite with his and hers closets and a large master bathroom. We were also able to add linen closets in the hall and family bath, which will create a lot of storage for us that we don’t currently have.

The first floor will get reconfigured, the kitchen will become bigger, with a full pantry wall and massive island (to fit all the kids) and have an open floor plan to what will become the dining room, where I have my fingers crossed that I’ll be able to have a bigger table that will allow for better entertaining.

We’ll also have access to the garage from here, where I’ll create a small mudroom area, so the kids outdoor things don’t get brought into the house. Plus we’ll be able to air out the hockey bags there. Although we couldn’t fit a double wide garage due to the placement of the house on the lot, we did sacrifice a little bit of the backyard and driveway so we could have double deep garage. Which means we can still park one car in the front and have a work space (whether it be for a car, boat or wood work area) in the back for Jay.

And finally, we’ll be demoing the walls between the bedrooms to create the new living room space, nothing is quite decided for this space in particular yet but I’m hoping I can create a larger seating area with space for the kids do sit, without having to sit in front of the tv.

Finally, we’ll be tackling the basement separately once we’re done with the main living space.

There’s so much that’s been happening and I’ll be sharing more of the journey soon, so stay tuned!

You Might Also Like

No Comments

Leave a Reply