The Start of Something Big

 I'm honestly not sure how to start a post that is months in the making of our new planned addition. We've gone through so many iterations of our idea and I want to go step-by-step through them, but I also don't want to wait forever for the final reveal. So excuse me if I seem a little scattered.

The background to this project was the inspiration we got from visiting family last Christmas. They had gutted the inside of their home, remodeled it, and added on a beautiful primary suite. While we were absolutely certain that any major project for us had to factor in us continuing to live in our house during construction, we thought there were probably some things we could do. There was just no way we were willing to rent a place and move out for a few months--that felt like too much. That meant no major additions in the main living space, especially since the kitchen and dining room overlook the backyard above the walk-up basement stairs (meaning a pop-out in that direction would require somehow rerouting the basement). So while we would LOVE a completely new, larger kitchen (rather than the cosmetic refresh we did 5 year ago), it wasn't something we would want to live through.

We realized that the office and guest rooms could easily be avoided for a few months if necessary, and decided to focus on what we could do in that area. We consulted a few design experts and arrived at the idea that expanding into the backyard through the office would offer us extra space without totally disrupting our lives during construction. We are only doing one floor of construction, rather than build up a second story, again to avoid having to totally move out of the upstairs for a while. 

And so, I present our current plan: a primary suite (bedroom and bathroom) off the office, expanding into the backyard. It will have a small deck that steps down to connect the space to our current patio.

Here is the zoomed-in view of the new part:

You can see from this picture that we're really getting into the structural design phase, so ignore all that extra stuff. The main idea is that from the office, you step down into a hallway (the step is because our yard slopes downward, so this reduces how high they have to build the foundation) with a bathroom on one side and a toilet/powder room on the other (more on why we did that in a future post). Then the bedroom is at the end of the hallway. It has wardrobe-style closets built into the wall, set off from the main bedroom by a floor-to-ceiling partial wall, then a large open room (king-sized bed, here we come!) that opens up onto a small deck.

Here's what it will look like from the top. I'll write a whole post on the roof angles soon, but this just gives you an idea of the overhead view.

And here it is looking at the house from the back yard. 

With this giant addition in square feet (516 sq. ft.!), it's funny to me that we don't actually get to say we're adding a bedroom, since the office (which currently counts as a 4th bedroom), will become an antechamber/sitting room/whatever into our new suite, so it can't continue to count as its own bedroom. This doesn't matter to us, but is annoying for if/when we ever sell. Still, we'll gain an extra bathroom and a huge new, modern addition, even if it will still be considered a 4-bedroom home.

The addition opens up lots of other follow-on possibilities for us, which we'll certainly be documenting in painstaking detail over the next year or so. Most importantly, and one of the reasons we're doing this addition, is that the kids will each get their own room upstairs, essentially taking over the top floor just in time for them to become moody tweens who don't want their parents around.

A word on timelines before I close this post out--we started talking with architects and came up with our initial designs last spring. Then we paused the discussions as we worked out our financing plan and just because of other life priorities. That turned out to be a good idea because it gave us the summer to rethink some of our design ideas and come back in the fall with some new thoughts. As I go room by room in more detail, I'll show you some of our early ideas and how we arrived at what we think is mostly our final decisions.

And get ready for tons and tons of pictures of bathroom tiles and paint swatches.