Breakdown (Planning a Renovation)

Right now we’re in the midst of the largest renovation we’ve undertaken together: the entire upstairs of our house. Taking apart almost half (500ish square feet) of our 1200 square foot house to the studs has been quite an undertaking so far, and we’re nowhere near finished. However, we do have a vision for the space, which is what motivates us to keep moving on this project (plus we’re sick of sleeping on a holey queen mattress with both dogs). So to keep looking forward, I want to share that vision.

I have very few “before” pictures of our upstairs, which is our bedroom/office, because I hated how the space was laid out and how it was decorated despite some valiant attempts at making it better. There’s only so much you can do with walls that have ugly paneling with no drywall underneath, and there’s no help for the horrible vertical blinds. Plus the lighting upstairs has always been sorely lacking, and the layout contributed to that with lots of creepy dark corners where the light simply didn’t reach. Right before Thanksgiving, I was laying in our (HUGE) new bed, looking up at the beautiful headboard Seth built for it and thinking about how much I hated the stapled-on cardboard ceiling tiles that were just above me, when I realized that we had plenty of budget room to get started on this renovation we’d been talking about for months now. So I insisted that we start right away and despite Seth’s protests that we wait until after the vacation we had planned for January, we decided to get going. In retrospect, getting construction work done around the holidays has its pitfalls, but I won’t say I was wrong.

So we came up with a plan, which to be honest had been discussed over multiple months, and then was largely revised a few times in the days leading up to starting actual construction. In a nutshell, we decided to add a brand new bathroom (taking our house from one full bath to two, Hallelujah!), rip out basically four existing walls of various sizes that were creating our current poorly-placed and oddly shaped closets, add built-in cabinets and two smaller but taller closets in more appropriate locations, replace all of the lighting, replace the entire ceiling and all of the walls with drywall, and lastly, add in new wood or bamboo flooring to replace the carpet. So essentially, we decided to gut it and start over.

This is the floor plan of the original space:

Notice how the closet placement creates awkward corners? Those corners have no overhead lighting within 10 feet of them either, which makes them basically useless at night. Also because the roof slopes on that side of the house, those areas are even harder to use since they are awkward AND dark.

This is the new floor plan we’ve thought out:  

See how relocating the closets makes the whole room more open and thus allows light to penetrate the whole room more fully? Plus of course there’s that whole bathroom which I am absurdly excited about. I am a firm believer that every house should have at LEAST two bathrooms.

Now, this is obviously somewhat premature since we’re still in the “destroy everything and then build it again” phase of things, but I’ve created two mood boards for the space-one for the bathroom and one for the rest of the bedroom space.

I have always wanted a dramatic tile shower in my bathroom, so I based this space entirely on giving myself one. I picked the shower tile before I picked literally ANYTHING else. Then I built the color scheme and the rest of the room around that. You gotta love how that bronze pops against the combination of white, gray, and turquoise!

For the rest of the upstairs, because it’s all one big space, I wanted to go with more muted colors for the walls, so as not to overwhelm the room, but I’ve added lots of pops of bright color based on a peacock feather color scheme that was inspired by the lovely blue chair pictured in the mood board that I bought at an estate sale a few years ago that never quite fit in in the house before. I’m so excited to see it all come to life, especially since I got a lot of the light fixtures and accessories for a steal (which I’ll talk about another day).

So that’s the plan so far. It’s the vision that’s keeping us going through the arduous process of renovating.