Another Round of Renovation Floor Plans for the New House
THE HILL HOUSE
Today we’re taking a break from the Poplar Cottage to talk about our new home, the Hill House! (Yup, I’m pretty sure that’s the name we’re going with!) While I love working on the Poplar Cottage, especially at this stage of finishes, I’m chomping at the bit to get started on our home! We’ve spent the summer debating the best floor plan and I can’t wait to share all the developments with you today. Let’s get into it…
When we first bought the Hill House (that name is feeling right to me…you too?) last September, we knew it would need a substantial renovation. But we were committed to living in it for 6 months before renovating in order to get a good feel for the house and also because we REALLY didn’t want the stress of renovating two houses at once. We were, and still are committed to finishing the Poplar Cottage before starting on the new house, which, surprise, surprise, is lingering a wee bit longer than we expected. But that’s okay because the extra time has given us more time to plan.
So let’s talk floor plans. The original floor plan actually has great flow - it was a big reason we fell in love with the house (or the house’s potential) in the first place. We love that it has 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, and is about 2,000sf - spacious but not too big. It’s efficient and there are no rooms that we don’t use every day. For the most part we’ve really liked having the primary bedroom on the main floor and the 3 kid bedrooms upstairs - a layout that is proving to be great for us in this stage of life, but admittedly wouldn’t have been ideal when our kids were smaller. All this to say, we’re starting from a great base!
Anywho, here’s the existing floor plan:
Do you remember our initial renovation floor plans that we shared back in April? I’ll let you go back to that post to check them out if not. But basically we had two really great plans, a ‘simple plan’ and a ‘dream big plan’. I kid you not, we’ve flipped flopped back and forth between them at least a dozen times since then. But after a lot of dreaming and late night discussions Garrett and I really thought we had settled on the ‘dream big plan’. Because IF the Poplar Cottage renovation has taught us anything, it’s taught us to do the full renovation right away.
But when we met with our architect and structural engineer this summer, we peeked in the attic and realized there was no ridge beam in our roof framing. So structurally, the chepest and easiest way to add a large second gable on the second floor and get our primary suite up there, would involve basically tearing off the second story and bringing in scissor trusses.
Ugh.
After chewing on that for awhile, we (okay, mostly me) realized that we were not up for that kind of project. That’s basically what we did at the Poplar Cottage and that project’s taken us 4 years…and we’re not even done. Of course we’re no strangers to delayed gratification so that alone wouldn’t hold us back, but there’s also the matter of money. We paid for a whole house when we bought the Hill House and to tear off half of it just to start over is incredibly expensive and seems financially not great.
And I just kept thinking that one of the main reasons we liked this house to begin with was because it feels manageable. Probably the biggest lesson we learned from the Farmhouse is that a house owns you as much as you own it. And adding a bunch of square footage upstairs would negate a whole lot of the positives we’ve felt from downsizing from a 3000sf to a 2000sf home.
So Garrett and I came back down to earth and asked ourselves, “can we work with the existing exterior walls and make this house great?” The answer is HECK YES! It’s a bit more modest than both of our previous plans and requires more creativity, but I think it’s a pretty great floor plan none the less.
Here’s our WORK WITH WHAT WE GOT PLAN…
A few changes to note:
Powder bath
We really thought long and hard whether we needed a powder bath on the main floor or if we could just let everyone use the primary bathroom. One less toilet to clean and all that! But after watching all number of kids run through the house and use the main floor bathroom, sometimes wet from sprinklers, sometimes sticky from popsicles, I realized that I don’t want to share. Ha! Don’t get me wrong, we love, LOVE having kids in and out of our house all evening (it’s my dream for our kids’ in-town childhood coming true!) but it’s a HECK YES on the additional half bathroom.
Hall closet / Primary bedroom entrance
To displace the lost closet where the powder bathroom could have been, we are considering rerouting our primary bedroom entrance to the living room, creating closet space in half of the original hallway. Honestly, entering our bedroom from the living room is not ideal, but I think the additional storage might be worth it. I think. Maybe. Thoughts?
SHRINKING THE DINING ROOM….A BIT
In this plan iteration I’ve shrunk down the dining room a little bit with some pantry cabinets. I think the extra storage would be very lovely, plus this house just screams for a cozier dining room with a built-in bench and casual dining vibe. We’ll see if my husband agrees…
A second hangout space
With three growing kids (we’re only 2 years away from having a teenager!), we wanted to create a second spot for the kids to hangout. Someday we’re hoping to have a garage with an ADU/hangout space upstairs (that we could rent when our family doesn’t need the space), but in the meantime we’re thinking the upstairs landing would be perfect. So we shrunk the largest bedroom and created a landing/snug at that top of the stairs. Bonus, it gives the stairs a better presence. The kid’s bedrooms aren’t huge but I’m a big believer in larger common spaces and smaller bedrooms so it’s a good change in my book.
Okay, that’s all for today. Thoughts? Comments?
