We decided to take down a wall, vault the ceiling, and name the new, blended space The Colloquium–a place for talking, for listening, for conversation. This is our hope.
Here is a glimpse of how the rooms looked originally. The side door (which leads to the carport) was our main entrance. The front door we never used. From the side door you looked straight down the hallway where to bedrooms are located. There is no wall between the room in the back half and the kitchen, hallway, etc.
Here is the plan for the new space:
There are a couple of things I want to point out right away. Our house has three bedrooms and one bathroom. I can be a rather adventurous person–I did go cliff jumping once–but one bathroom for seven people is not the kind of adventure I enjoy. Thus, the first thing you may notice about this floorplan is that there is a kitchen in it, even though the two rooms we merged were living and dining spaces. The reason for this is that the existing kitchen will be converted into a second bathroom sometime in the future.
The second thing to note is that the wall where the piano is placed is now an actual wall. This is partly to support the vaulted ceiling and partly because (if you’ll remember) the existing kitchen will soon be a second bathroom, and bathrooms with no walls are no bathrooms at all. Although I did once have to use a toilet in the Dominican Republic whose “walls” were waist-high strips of tin. (See, I told you I was adventurous.) That’s not the feel we’re going for, so a new wall would have to be built.
Oh, and that little yellow spot on the kitchen counter is a mug.
We replaced one of the back windows with a door (you can see it there between the chairs and the piano) for two reasons: one, because the carport also has remodeling plans, and the side door would no longer lead outside; two, because it was becoming tiresome to have to run out the side of the house if I needed to get to the backyard quickly. We have had that door in place for several weeks now, and it’s so much more convenient!
There is not very much to say about the floorplan besides the kitchen–that was what was the most difficult and time-consuming to figure out, and caused the most joy when I finally cracked the code. I’ll talk more about the evolution of the kitchen in my next post.