Even though I’ve shared every step of the remodeling of the part of our house that has now become our bedroom from start to finish, I know that there are still some people who don’t know exactly how we got from point A to point B. Although I tried to explain it using a series of pictures, I completely understand that it can still be very confusing. If you don’t live in the house yourself and aren’t able to walk through the building and see it in person, sometimes things get lost in translation when you’re just looking at a bunch of pictures.
This became clear to me this past weekend when I met up with a certain couple of bloggers that I have followed for years and tried to find out about their current remodeling project that is changing their entire floor plan. Even though I looked at every single picture and read every single description, I still couldn’t make sense of it. And I kept thinking, “It would be a lot easier to understand if I could just see a floor plan.” However, I suspect that they have a personal preference to stop sharing the floor plans of their house. I completely understand that. Some people are uncomfortable sharing floor plans, especially if they have children in the household.
But I’m not afraid to share the floor plan. For those of you who are still a little confused about how we got from point A to our current arrangement, I thought I’d try to clear that up with some actual floor plans of the various changes we’ve made over the years.
I’ll start with the original floor plan of this area of the house. Originally this area appeared to be an overwhelming mess. From the entrance and dining room you can see the very large, rectangular hallway. There were two cupboards directly behind the paneled opening to the hallway. And then off that hallway there were three bedrooms and a hallway bathroom. The master bedroom had a small walk-in closet and the other two bedrooms each had a small closet.
The very first update I made shortly after we moved in was to remove the two closets, widen the paneled opening to the music room, and widen the door to the bathroom.
After this update the hallway looked like this…
The biggest update came a few years later when we decided to convert the original master bedroom into a master bathroom. To do this we had to prepare the room for the master bathroom. To do this, the wall had to be moved further into the hallway, creating a significantly smaller hallway. We also closed the original door from the original master bedroom to the hallway and then added a new door from the home gym to the master bathroom.
That’s also when I decided to close the door from the guest bedroom to the small closet and then open both closet areas to the home gym. So this is the original closet that was in the guest room…
And I locked it so that it was no longer accessible from the guest room…
And then I had both closet areas open to each other (i.e. I had the divider between them removed) and then opened them both to the home gym. This gave me this large, open closet area in the home gym.
But storing this closet area also created this really long “hallway” in the home gym.
So in the last update, I removed the closet walls to give the bedroom more space, and then I had the door to that room and the surrounding wall completely removed, allowing the bedroom and foyer to flow together without separation.
And that’s where this open look came from. We still have this small “hallway” that separates the bedroom from the foyer, but since the original closets were completely removed, this “hallway” area is no longer as long as it was when the room was a home gym and the closet area was still in place.
Every time I post these before and after pictures on social media, I get the inevitable comments saying, “That’s not even the same room!” Apparently it is. And I know that so many of you who have watched all of these changes over the years know that this is the same space. And yet, I know that without the actual floor plans, it can be really difficult to imagine all the changes that have resulted in the building looking so drastically different than it did when it started. Hopefully this clears up any confusion!
