The Plan

OK, time to tell you about what we're actually doing in here--

This is the view from the kitchen. This wall will be insulated and covered with drywall, with "wall washer" recessed lighting on the ceiling directed at the wall (for illuminating artwork) plus 4 normal downward recessed lights. Because the floor will be raised (more on that in a second), the garage door has to be lifted, which means some masonry work. It's also going to be a fire-rated door to block off any potential garage issues, and with no window (it will look just like our front door). There will be a switch that controls all the lights near the garage door, and crown and baseboard molding to match the rest of the house. 

Moving clockwise, towards our front yard, this wall will no longer have a door on it. It will have two nice windows with horizontal grid lines to match our other windows and the rest will be insulated. The outside will have some detailing to match the rest of the house and covered with Hardie board, which is a fancy type of siding that offers better insulation.

Making our way around the room, the wall with the shorter dresser on it (you can actually see it in the photo above better than the photo below) is going to remain brick. The wall around and between the two doors (to the living room and kitchen) will be drywalled. The middle area where the clock is hanging will have an ethernet connection and plugs, since it seems a logical place to mount a TV.

One thing - our designer isn't putting crown molding above the exposed brick. I'm having trouble imagining if that is right or not, since we don't have any brick now. The rest of the room will have it. Does that sound right? The doors to the living room and kitchen will be removed and the frame puttied where the hinges currency are. Another set of light switches will go in here as well.

Moving to the back - this wall will actually look very similar to how it is now, just raised off the ground. We are retaining the french doors, which apparently are worth several thousand dollars. The parts above the door will get insulation and finished with molding to match the rest.

Onwards to the floor - the flood will be raised to meet the level of the kitchen/living room. The wood we decide on will actually be brought into the kitchen, which requires a lot of extra work to move out the stove and fridge, possibly carve some space in the cabinet above the fridge (our builder isn't quite sure until the remove the linoleum and look at the bottom of the fridge to see the levelers if we have enough clearance at the top, but fortunately the cabinet has a large lip we can work with).

In addition, they're sprinkling lots of outlets around, running one to the exterior in the back, and adding two lights outside the back french doors - a decorative entrance light and a security light, both controlled from the two switches in the house.

Left to be determined - the exact flooring (we go shopping with our builder in a couple weeks to select it) and the huge issues of HVAC. We thought we had it figured out but the current heating guy seems pricy and the radiant heat quotes seemed strange to our builder. So we're calling in a few more opinions. But we're about 2 to 3 weeks out from construction...

Which means we really have to work on emptying out all that junk...