Well, I’m not quite ready to reveal any further progress in the bedroom at this point. That will probably have to wait until Friday. In the meantime, before bed last night, I took some time to play around with our floor plan and try out four different ideas for our pantry that came from reader comments on previous posts. I think any of these would work, but there are pros and cons to each.
First, let me show you real pictures to remind you how these areas flow together in real life. I’ll start with the music room. Obviously this is not a current picture. Once I have the bedroom ready to load furniture and decorations into, I get the tools, boxes and paint cans from the music room and get current pictures. But for now this will have to be enough.
In the picture above, the paneled opening on the far left is now the door to our bedroom. I installed the French doors there as bedroom doors. The doors in the middle of the photo lead to the winter garden. This is the room that will be demolished and once we build our addition, the room directly behind these doors will be the family room. And then the paneled opening on the right leads into the kitchen.
The view from the paneled opening between the music room and the kitchen looks like this…
Just behind the peninsula is the dining area. In the photo above, this area was used as a living room (long story). But for now it is being used as our temporary bedroom while I work on our bedroom suite. The 15 liter pocket door to the left of the shelves leads to my studio.
And then if I turn a little to the right, you can see the paneled opening between the kitchen and the front living room.
When I stand at the end of the kitchen peninsula and look at the door to my studio, I see the pantry there on the left.
So here’s a better view from the dining area (I’m standing by the windows at the front of the house) of the pantry, the back wall of the kitchen, and on the far left of the picture you can see the paneled opening between the kitchen and the music room.
Hopefully this will help you find your way around a little better. So once we build the addition, the new family room will be behind the music room and kitchen and share a wall with the current pantry. So the first idea, which is obviously the easiest, is to leave the pantry as it is and not bother putting a door between it and the family room. Obviously I really like this idea because it fits my goal of finishing the house as quickly as possible and allows me to keep all the storage space there. The downside is that the only way to the dining area is through the kitchen. That might not be a big deal. It’s not like we live in a sprawling mansion, so the distance from the family room door to the dining area really isn’t that far.
The second idea I had in mind was to widen the opening between the dining area and pantry as much as possible while leaving enough wall space between the dining area and pantry to hide the freezer. And then I would move the freezer to the opposite wall to make room for an opening between the family room and pantry. The advantage of this is that it would be a more convenient route from the living room to the dining area, avoiding traffic through the kitchen. The obvious disadvantages are: (1) I would lose storage space in the pantry and (2) traffic would pass through the pantry, which might seem inconvenient. Additionally, every time you add another door, you have to think about traffic flows through rooms with furniture. So a door there would limit the options for furniture placement in the family room.
The third option is to remove this wall entirely and leave the back wall of cabinets away from the pantry. The advantage of this is that the dining area would appear much more open. The downside is that there would be no room for my freezer and I wouldn’t know where else to put the freezer.
And the final option would be to shrink the pantry to about 2/3 of its current size, keep 2/3 of the pantry on the right side of its current footprint, add a wall on the left, and create some kind of alcove with a door between the two areas. I actually really like this idea. The downside is the loss of storage space, but I also love that I could put a larger window in this little nook to get a better view of the backyard. I can imagine it with some nice curtains, maybe a small bookshelf under the window, a table lamp for soft light at night, etc.
So these are the options you gave me. I love trying out different ideas that readers give me and seeing how they might work for us. You all know that my brain is in ruts and I have a hard time getting out of those ruts. That’s why it’s always nice to have ideas from outside that help me think outside the box.
What do you think about these ideas? And if you wrote a suggestion in a previous post and I missed it here, let me know and I’ll add another floor plan with the new idea.
