Thoughtful Planning

Before the property was even ours we spent hours discussing how we wanted the house to function and what the best use of space was.  We knew we wanted to capitalize on the large, open room and honor the history of the building by not just building a bunch of walls in the beautiful, large room.  However, we also had the opportunity to make it function perfectly for us because we were starting with a blank slate.  We have no intention of moving again, we hope to raise our babes here and eventually be able to call it "grandma and grandpa's house"; literally "build our history" on this historic property so we wanted to make sure that the decisions we make along the way are the right ones for the long run.  I've spent a lot of time thinking of the evolution of the rooms we are building and how they will be utilized not only now, but far down the road as well.

With Grayson and Radlee's room "finished" in the back of the house we turned our attention to the front of the house where the Master bedroom and Cooper's room would be.

One of the stumbling blocks we ran into while laying out these bedrooms was natural lighting.  As I've mentioned, the original building has windows on 3 sides (18 in all) however, the entire west side (5 windows) is behind a wall that will be the master bath and closets, 3 are in the room in the south east corner of the house, 1 window is in the future pantry on the north east corner and 2 have been cemented over in the baptismal (these will eventually be re-installed for our kitchen).  This left 7 windows currently in the main room, but 2 or 3 of these would have to be in the master bedroom.  In order to capitalize on the natural light in the great room and provide a bit of privacy to our master bedroom we set the door back from the plane of the bedroom walls, this creates an entry nook to our bedroom, and allowed us to utilize an extra window in the great room.  As it stands now, our bedroom has 2 windows and the great room has 5 that provide beautiful light.

First walls going up, height isn't an issue when scaffolding is involved!

The other benefit of recessing the master bedroom door is that it creates an entrance to the room, the wall the door is on is about 5' wide, I have chosen to use narrow double doors (4' wide total) into the space.  Standard height doors (7.5') would look squat in such a tall room so we decided to put transoms above the interior doors which will visually increase the doorways to the height of the windows, plus allow more natural light to bounce around.  All of the existing exterior doors have transoms so this will also help build cohesiveness throughout the house.

Master bedroom to the left, Coopers room to the right

Straight into our bedroom is a sitting area, the closet door will eventually go away and the door to the bathroom will be moved further down this wall.  I envision a cozy love seat for curling up and reading, the sleeping area is to the right of the entry.

Master bedroom entry

 Cooper's room posed a new set of challenges.  Having a kids bedroom door directly off of my great room was not ideal, however after toying with the plan it was the only solution we could come to.  We considered building a wing wall, perpendicular to the big living room / bedroom wall, creating a hallway for his bedroom door and the future powder room but, again, we didn't want to chop up the space with unnecessary walls, maintaining the symmetry of this space is very important to me.  I decided that hidden (and easily accessible) storage would be key in not driving me crazy in this room that is in plain sight from the couch.  We ran closets the full depth of the room on the wall that his room shares with ours, lots of shelves and storage behind closed doors should help.  I am also considering a platform bed with rolling bins underneath he can roll out to play with toys and roll away when he is done.  The other situation we had to consider was the back wall of his room, which is shared with our bathroom.  Our bathroom has lower ceiling than the rest of the house (8', I think) and we have designed our shower and toilet room to pop into his room, in order to not have 5' of empty space and to eliminate battle of the ceiling being higher than the room is wide, we created a loft on 2 sides of his room, making the closet only 8' high, as well as the back wall.  I am so excited to create a reading loft for the boys in this space with a ladder and railing.

Cooper's loft, the openings will all be framed and sheet rocked in.

 

I couldn't believe the difference the these walls made, suddenly our commercial building was becoming a home, ready for move-in day!