For the past two days, I haven’t been able to focus on anything other than our new home plan. After scrapping the addition we’d been planning for years (you can read more about that here ), and deciding to basically work within the footprint of our existing home, adding just one room, my mind has been in overdrive. I’ve spent hours in front of my computer moving things around on the floor plan to come up with the perfect arrangement for everything we need. I’ve been walking around the house with a tape measure in hand, measuring almost every wall and every opening in the house.
It took me several tries, a lot of thinking about our specific needs (especially Matt’s), and a lot of moving things around and tweaking different ideas, but I got the final floor plan. Here it is.
The most interesting part is that the new room we are adding will be a brand new kitchen!!! So let me explain my thought processes behind all of these decisions, and I will talk about why I decided to create this new room in the kitchen.
First, let’s start with the master suite. Since we already have the master bathroom done, it makes sense to convert the bedroom next to it into a master bedroom. Once the remaining closet walls and areas are removed, this room will be much larger than the one we’re in now. We desperately need a bigger bedroom, so this works perfectly. It’s definitely not as big as the room we had planned for our original addition, but this room will be wide enough to move Matt’s Hoyer elevator without me constantly bumping into it, hitting my head on it while trying to walk past it, or tripping over it, all of which are common occurrences in our current bedroom.
Since there is no space in the actual bedroom for a closet (a closet in that room would make that room the same size as the bedroom we live in now, which is not feasible in the long run), I am going to convert the current guest room into a large walk-in closet/workout area/storage area for Matt’s gear. I will finally be able to use the IKEA Pax wardrobes and have a nice, big, organized closet on one side of that area. Since it is literally the size of a bedroom (because it is a bedroom) and I don’t have a lot of clothes or shoes, there will be plenty of room for the basic workout gear we want to keep, plus a large floor space in the middle to keep the mat gear (Hoyer lift, shower chair, etc.) when he’s not using it. It will be the perfect big open space we need for all of this stuff. I will be closing off that room that overlooks the hallway, but I also decided to leave the existing door in place (it’s a pocket door) and put drywall over it. That way, if a future owner wanted to turn this back into a bedroom, it would be as simple as putting drywall over one door and removing the drywall from another door, and then, just like that, it would be a bedroom again. It would already have a door.
Now let’s talk about the music room. Every time I come up with floor plan ideas, most people seem to want to put the music room on the cutting table. But I can’t stress this enough. The music room cannot be changed, cannot be furnished, and cannot be used in any other way. Although it is not used as an actual music room (unfortunately, I don’t have time to play the piano right now), this room is currently one of the most used rooms in our house, and it’s a room we couldn’t live without.
First and foremost, visually, I really like the view from the front door to the back of the music room. I really don’t want to put anything there that would obstruct that view.
But even if I wanted to change that room and do something else, like turn it into a dining room, it would be impossible. This would make life extremely difficult for Matt because this is the busiest room in our house all day long. With Matt in a wheelchair, I have to constantly think about traffic flow and not put things in his way so he can get through the main areas and all the exits in the house. As you can see, with the music room in the middle of the house, it gets so much traffic that the current arrangement is the most ideal way to make that room look beautiful, complete, and purposeful, while also keeping it open for Matt to easily get through. I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be if I tried to turn that room into anything else.
This is also the area where I transfer Matt to and from his wheelchair using the Hoyer lift. It’s the only room in our house that has enough space for me to set up his wheelchair the right way, and then pull the Hoyer lift right into it. So if I went and put a dining table or anything like that in that room, it would be destroying its very valuable function for us. So while the name “music room” is a bit misleading, this is one of the most functional rooms in the house as it is. There’s no way I would change anything about the layout of the music room.
Now let’s talk about the fun stuff! My new kitchen! I thought of many options for that area including making the new room a dining room, making the new room a laundry room, and even making the new room a TV room. So why did I finally decide to make that area a new kitchen? Because I could have windows and natural light right into the kitchen!
One of my least favorite things about our home is that the current kitchen is right in the middle, and has no windows that let direct sunlight into the kitchen. I opened it up so it could get sunlight from the adjacent rooms, but I would like the kitchen to have lots of windows and natural light.
So when I was trying to turn that area into a laundry room, and add all those gorgeous windows, I knew this had to be the kitchen! I could imagine having a sink with large windows above the countertop. This is the beginning of my dream kitchen! And in the last 24 hours, I’ve looked at so many beautiful and inspiring kitchens that I have in mind! I’m so excited to have a kitchen full of light!
Once I realized that the new room was the perfect place for a new kitchen, everything else fell into place. If the new room was going to be a kitchen, the current pantry placement made no sense. Plus, this new kitchen would be larger than my current kitchen, eliminating the need for a pantry anyway. So if I relocated the entryway to that room, it would be the perfect spot for a laundry room/utility room!
Then, with the entryway moved to the current pantry/future laundry room, this solid wall can now be a TV wall in what is now the TV room. I didn’t realize until yesterday, while I was walking around and measuring everything, that the current living room is almost the same size as the living room we use as a living room. What makes the living room look so small is the furniture arrangement because I have to leave the walkway through the room open. But with the current pantry door closed, and this wall turned into a TV wall, rearranging the furniture will make this room look much larger. Also, there will be no peninsula for the kitchen, making this room look very closed off.
This is the perfect dining room. The current kitchen will become my dining room. It’s the perfect spot for a dining area, between the kitchen and the TV room in the living room. It looks like it was meant to be! I can put a table and chairs there without blocking the traffic flow through the room.
I’ve thought about this a lot, put a lot of time into it, and now I feel very confident that we will eventually get there. In fact, I feel so confident that I’m ready to start right away! Which brings up the question of timeline.
The first priority is to move into a larger bedroom. So, with that goal in mind, we need to get this bedroom ready. This means tearing out the floor and subfloor, installing new floor and subfloor, removing the remaining closet walls, and creating a doorway from the new bedroom to the existing guest room. The existing breaker box is in the right place for the new doorway, so it will need to be moved as well.
Once that’s done, I’ll close the door to the current guest room in the hallway and start converting it into a closet and exercise area.
After this part of the house is finished, we will start adding the kitchen, as well as converting the pantry into a laundry room. I really hope that I can reuse most, if not all, of the existing cabinets that I built for that room.
So I don’t know exactly when we’re going to start building the new kitchen, but that’s the order we want to do things in. Matt also said he wants to build my woodshop at the same time we build the kitchen. So we’ll see how that goes.
I decided to leave the bedroom to someone else, because while they’re at it, I want to finish the studio and studio bathroom. I was also hoping to do the hallway bathroom before I started on the main stuff. But if I can’t finish the hallway bathroom before the bedroom, I want to at least finish the studio and studio bathroom before moving on to something else.
This is the plan! Over the past week, I’ve gone from angry to sad to disappointed to curious to overly excited to absolutely ecstatic. 🤣 It’s been an amazing week!
Here’s another comparison. This is what we have now…
Here was the original addition plan.
Here’s the new, much smaller plan…
Note: Guys, I’m so sorry for all the typos, misspelled words, excessive use of random commas, etc. in this original post. I think I’ve fixed everything now. I got about 2 sentences into this post and the keyboard on my laptop stopped working. Just stopped! It’s been giving me problems for the past couple months (the W and L keys don’t work, so I have to literally copy and paste any time I want to use those letters), but it’s now fully functional. (I hate getting new computers and having to transfer/update everything, so I put it off as much as possible.) So I ended up writing this post on my phone. And since I didn’t want to type it all out on a tiny screen, I used voice recognition. Well, not only does voice recognition understand my Texan accent sometimes, it also likes commas more than I do! 🤣 Anyway, all this to say that I think everything is now consistent and readable. I hope so. And I think I need to go out this afternoon and buy a new laptop.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my home decorating and project journey, renovating and decorating the 1948 home my husband Matt and I purchased in 2013. Matt has MS and can’t do any physical labor, so I do most of the work around the house myself. You can learn more about me here.
