If you’ve been following along on my Facebook page, you’ve been hearing all about our new house that we bought! We just had settlement earlier this week, but luckily, we don’t have to be out of our current house until the end of this month. So that gives us a little over 3 weeks to move things over and start renovations.
And my goodness, we have a lot of renovating we want to do! Today I’m going to show you the first floor before renovations. One of the reasons we decided to buy this house, was because it was VERY well taken care of and in great condition. It just wasn’t our style and the first floor had a lot of small, choppy rooms.
Here is the current floor plan that my husband quick drew up of the first floor.
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I’m going to start by showing you pictures of the kitchen which is the top left room on the floor plan.
This is me standing towards the middle of the house, looking at the kitchen and garage door. We’ll be taking down the cabinets above the peninsula and relocating them to the laundry room (that’s actually happening tomorrow! Hooray!). We’re also taking down all the soffits and replacing the upper cabinets with new ones that extend to the ceiling.
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The cabinets are actually in pretty rough shape. They’re almost 30 years old and weren’t high quality to begin with. Some even seem like you’d get splinters reaching in. So even the bottom ones that are staying will need sanded and refinished.
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The other view from the kitchen (garage door looking into the center of the house), is interrupted by this large wall.
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Inside the wall, is the half bathroom for the first floor, the pantry and the coat closet is on the end of it. When we first looked at the house and they still had their table there, you couldn’t even get in the bathroom without moving a chair. I just think it’s the oddest place for a bathroom! The pantry is so small, it’s not even very useful. The coat closet is also an odd location, because it’s not even close to any outside door!
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We plan on tearing this entire wall down! The whole thing! So when I’m standing in my kitchen, I can see straight through to the opposite wall of the living room!
See that wood stove back there? That’s part of the living room.
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And here’s the other side of that large wall that’s breaking it all up.
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We also plan on relocating that wood stove to the basement, which means we have to remove all the brick. Then we can open up the wall between the front living room and the back family room. We want to just make it all one big space!
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So when I’m standing in the front living room, that wall in the middle right (with the return vents), will either be opened up or it will be turned into a half wall/bookshelf with a pillar. The wall on the left is the stairwell wall. We’re opening up the stairwell on both sides so it hopefully looks something like this when we’re finished:
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(inspiration picture I found on Google with no site that it linked to)
Once we open up both sides of the staircase and take down all the dining room walls, I will be able to look straight across the front of the house rather than have this view:
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The green room you see in the distance is the current dining room. We have no need for that, so we plan on relocating the half bath to the far corner (where you can see the outlet on the wall).
The picture below is me looking into the dining room from the kitchen. All the walls would come down. The half bath would go to the right of the window. To the left of the window, we plan on putting a coat rack/shoe bench.
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So this is me standing in the eating area of the kitchen looking towards the dining room. The hallway will be eliminated and the desk will be relocated to between the garage door and what will eventually be the bathroom wall.
Edited to add: We have since decided to eliminate the desk completely. The bathroom wall will now extend the whole way to the edge of what is currently the doorway opening. This leaves room for a nice-sized walk-in pantry where we originally thought the desk would go.
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So this is approximately what our final first floor will look like (with one flooring throughout the whole first floor to tie it together!):
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My only issue that keeps tripping me up is that I want to fit a kitchen island in somewhere. I had wanted it to square off the layout that was already there, but looking at this floor plan, I don’t think it will work. I think it makes it too tight of a squeeze between the garage door, the desk and the corner of the 1/2 bath. I don’t want to shift it over too far, though, because then it will be off-set and not look natural.
I’m just not sure what to do with the rest of that open space we’ll have by eliminating the dining room walls. An island would be perfect because we host gatherings a lot and need the extra space, plus I would need the storage since we’re eliminating a pantry and the cabinets above the peninsula.
We may have to keep a pillar at the corner of where the dining room used to be (the corner where the desk is in a previous picture), and I thought maybe I could tie that into an island, but I’m just afraid it will look too forced.
Any ideas??
Edited again (sorry, we’ve been thinking about this A LOT!): after meeting with our contractor, we’ve decided to remove the peninsula completely and that will allow us to add an island to run parallel to the cabinets that run along the back of the house.
Since I originally wrote this post, all of our renovations are completed!!
Our plans for the old dining room changed a bit since this post, although it still is exactly what I wanted it to be: our new mudroom and powder room! Be sure to check out THIS POST to see all the changes we made to this space! You seriously won’t believe what that green room looks like now!
THIS POST shows the before and after of the living room renovations after we removed that huge wall that used to include the powder room and coat closet!
We even moved upstairs and completely remodeled the kids’ bathroom and laundry room! Check out the Before and Afters to see some of my potty humor!
Currently, we’re working on the basement! The basement that we said we weren’t going to finish… the basement that we said was just going to be for storage… yep, it’s getting finished as we speak!