It's not that big

Our house is just not that big. It's not that small, but it's not big enough for all the ideas I have for it. It could be made bigger but we're not doing that. See last post.

So my plan never involved a formal dining room. I am not a big formal dining room kind of person. I barely get out of my pajamas. My neighbors know this is not an exaggeration but the rest of you will have to trust me. We will have an eating area with a cozy, inviting bench. But we have to seat 10 people. I have 10 people at my house regularly. Ask my cousins. First, second, third cousins, they all show up and we end up being 10 people. I love it, but each booty needs a seat. Currently we kind of squish in and no one can walk around the table. I don't love that.

So the other day the cabinet maker and construction foreman came over for a 2 hr meeting. We discussed endless intricate details which all seemed to convey just how small this space is. Actually it's not that small. It's 11 x 21, with the middle section soon to be 14 x 21. Details were coming along, changes being discussed, reassurances made about how different it will feel with the walls down. Then we got to planning the eating area. Table has to go in the 11 ft wide part and that's just not big enough. All this would be easily improvised if I didn't insist on a large center island and a separate wall oven and cooktop, and coffee bar, and and and. I have to prioritize.

So I will spare you the details of the heart attack where I thought I'd just blown my deposit because this whole plan is impossible and that's why we haven't done this for 10 years and we have to move and I want to throw up. Pause. Breathe. Reset. The cabinet maker found a solution involving a pretty small extension to an existing wall, and a slightly unconventional layout being more squarish than rectangular for the big meals, but now we can fit 10 or 11.

There were two related realizations that came out of this conversation. First is that I really cannot comprehend what it will fee like with the walls torn down and thus it's hard for me to make layout decisions. The contractors with dozens of years of experience are much better at it and were gently guiding me to see that sometimes extending a wall can actually make the space bigger, by allowing better layout. All my years of living in and thinking about this space isn't the only kind of experience needed to imagine it better. Also, everything is a compromise. I have to prioritize my wish list of more open space, a big island, lots of counter and storage space and a big table. In any home, those priorities are in conflict with each other so we have to figure out the best balance. Notice I didn't even throw budget in there. In a sense budget is the least of the players when balancing storage space vs. flow.

But the whole thing was a bit of a gut check on my expectations. I have to stop imagining that I'm going to end up with a huge open, roomy space, that one sees in the large 6,000 square foot tear downs around here. It will be a huge improvement from what I have now, but I'm not sure I have the right image in my head. And I swear to God, there is a little part of me that thinks this kitchen is going to cook dinner for me.

Am I dreaming?

So I got this email....I think I might be dreaming

Jenna,

Yes, Wednesday (November 19) at 11:00 am will work for me.  Please meet me at our showroom/office:

 18761 N. Frederick Ave Suite CC Gaithersburg, MD 20879

This process includes but not limited to:

- Mill work selection

- Counter top (granite) will provide samples (from our office) and also we will go to Artistic granite (7910 Cessna Ave. Gaithersburg MD 20879)

-  We have some tile samples here in our showroom (if you do not like the choices, we will proceed to The tile shop (15142 Frederick Rd Rockville MD)

- Selection of faucet fixtures at Somerville (15815 Frederick Rd Rockville MD 20855)

Typically this process takes approximately 2 hours or less, so please plan accordingly.

*Did you receive Jeff's drawings?

* Can provide a good contact number for me to contact you?

Thank you and advise if you have any questions, 

Renovation math and rationalizing

One final rationalization

Besides a home and maybe a fine art collection, I can't think of many other big purchases that are such a mix of investment and emotion. Herein lies the problem for an indecisive over-thinker like me. Time to dive into fuzzy math and rationalizations until decision equilibrium is reached or no one will speak to me anymore or both. (I think there are some guys I worked with at a dot-com start-up who still may not have recovered from a car purchase I made in 1998.)

Some explanation.....

Maybe these floor plans help clarify why it has been so hard for us to figure out what to do with this house. Neither of the below plans is all that accurate but they're all I have right now. The existing plan on the left is from our mortgage documents and is just meant to show the outline of the structure. Because it's missing walls you can't see how cut up the rooms are and doesn't include the front porch or decks. The new plan on the right has already been altered- see purple for now, and doesn't extend to show the living room or family room.

Floor plan from mortgage "before"

So what is really tempting is to square off the missing chunk of house. If we did a large 3 story renovation and "squared off" the existing floor plan we'd have about 300-400 extra square feet on each level, for another approximately 900 square feet (although some of it would be basement space). As it is, we're adding about 80 square feet, maybe even less. The difference in cost is about 3-4 fold. Perhaps this explains the tortuous math a bit. If we could triple our budget we would get 10 times the new footage. Additionally we could create a basement apartment and actually reduce our costs. This math makes me kind of sick to my stomach. I think pretty hard before spending several hundred dollars (except for the case of groceries). One time I bought a 12 pack of coconut flakes instead of a single pack to save something like 50c. per pack. I'm not a complete cheapskate but I do like to make smart decisions and neither of us is managing a hedge fund. Well we can't triple our budget. So here we are spending 1/3 the money and getting 1/10th the space. This is not good.

Tentative "after"
only shows dining room, kitchen
and stairs from old plan

After completing this math and causing four days of insomnia I had to have my contractor come back and talk me through this.

I asked if we doubled our budget and put in a basement apartment, what else would we get. Not a ton. Most of what would be left after excavation would end up being /stairs/hallway/reconfiguring roof lines. Because of the proximity of our neighbors we can't get any equipment back there. All digging would be done by hand with shovels, and cement would be walked back in wheelbarrows. Perhaps I should call an Amish crew! But over the course of our discussions he framed things a bit differently, and in a way that made me much more comfortable. He formulated a different equation. He suggested that if you look at budget versus needs met then the below plan is an excellent balance. It affords us basically 100% of our stated needs. We get a new front entrance, a new kitchen, a new mudroom, a much more modern, flowing, open home. It meets all the needs I laid out as important to me. Do I need a 4th bedroom, a large home office, an additional 300 square feet of glorified hallway space connecting all these odd levels and indentations? Not really.  And as my neighbor asked, "Do I want to live through seasons of construction, rather than weeks?" No. Do I want to get as much ROI as possible for every dollar spent? Of course, but we all have budgets and we need to live someplace.

So I am now comfortable that we are doing the "right" thing financially, at least for us. We will end up with a house that is fully functioning and that we can afford, with or without a renter. It will be flowing (enough) and new and beautiful.

Would I like my house to be bringing me income? Yes, but my contractor suggested that down the line we could reconfigure the existing basement storage areas to be an apartment, if we really felt selling it as an income or nanny suite would raise value. I don't see us doing that but it is possible.

OK. Decision (re)made. Breathe.

Pre-Renovation ...the Big Decision

Welcome!

Introduction

This first post will be rather lengthy, with a second post probably not coming for a while. We have about 2 months until we start, during which time I'll receive plans, finalize layouts and all materials selections, and his mill will make the cabinets but no work will be done in the house. In the mean time I'll be obsessively collecting ideas on Pinterest and Houzz! My contractor likes to have everything ordered or constructed before demo begins so as to keep the timeline quick. I am told this project will 6 weeks starting early January.

Front elevation 2014

Front elevation 2005

Welcome to our home. We bought it in 2005, at the height of the real estate boom. We probably overpaid. This house is just 1,950 square feet with 3 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms a living room, dining room, kitchen, family room addition and a finished but older basement.

We've already made some improvements. The biggest thing we did was add a front porch and flagstone walkways, as well as paint the entire home a single unifying color. We also renovated an upstairs bathroom, replaced a furnace, added a built-in bench in the living room, molding on the first floor and painted about half the rooms. The kitchen renovation has been something I've thought about for literally hours and hours through the years. It's a tricky house to fix.

Love it or List it

View across street of a house much prettier than ours

There are many competing financial, practical and emotional forces that have impacted our decision to Love It or List It. The layout is very compartmentalized and even partially fixing that will be expensive, the surrounding traffic is terrible and truth be told there are only a few kids the age of my kids in our neighborhood (although we love them!). Also with me working in the MD suburbs and Dave working in Arlington only two days a week we really could live someplace less central. On the other hand, the kids are settled, even if I'm not always thrilled with the schools or quantity of playmates, moving is expensive and there is traffic everywhere. Also inertia is a powerful force. I kind of have the attitude that if I'm not moving to a condo in Pacific Palisades or back to Boston then I'm not uprooting everyone to go anywhere else here either. 

I have had some pretty serious back problems the past 18 months and this multi-level house is not the greatest for me. Many of these problems will be fixed in this reno (mainly a kitchen requiring less bending), but a first floor master is not one of them. Hopefully things won't deteriorate to the point that I need a first floor master before the kids go to college, but if that happens, we'll move then.

One reason I'm hesitant to move is that our surrounding neighborhood is slated for some serious development. On the one hand, I'd love to get the heck out of here before the unbearable traffic gets made worse by hundreds of millions of dollars in construction projects - even billions if the Purple Line is built, but the pragmatic side of me knows that if we can wait it out the construction should be done around the time my kids have left for college, and we could theoretically sell the house at quite an increased value, right at a time when we could downsize/get me a main floor master. I realize that's quite a few "ifs" but nothing is certain in life or real estate. The investment value, in addition to my getting queasy at the sunk costs involved in moving has propelled us towards renovation.

Of course there is another option, which is to do nothing. That's the route we've taken for the past 10 years (at least with regards to the kitchen) and I'm now miserable every time I enter the room (which is often). My back always hurts, nothing in there is bright or new or nice, and more than that, the old cabinets and stove are really hard to use, require a lot of bending, reaching, running up and down basement stairs. I've been able to convince myself that a new kitchen would be a huge improvement in my physical well-being. Certainly it will be an improvement for my mental well-being.

Additionally, the kitchen is so dysfunctional that it's hard for us to eat together as a family, let alone have friends or extended family over. The kids like to do their home work at the table, and that leaves no room for anyone else to sit. Plus the kids end up on top of each other, staring at one another and listening to the other one chew. Not good. Melodramatic as it may sound, I believe improving the flow and functionality of our main floor will actually improve the quality of our family life.

So here we are, ready to renovate. 

House Tour and Basic Plans

Front porch and entrance

Front porch

Main entrance

The front porch is perhaps my favorite "room" although I also like the living room. The best thing we did for sure was to install hooks in the porch ceiling so that we can hang pretty flowers.

Typical center entrance colonial

But the front porch also functions as mud room, which is not appealing at all. Then the "mud room" continues into the front entrance and dining room. We are constantly over-run by shoes, boots, tae kwon do equipment, school papers etc. I have come to the conclusion that the only way to alleviate this is to make the kids come in a separate entrance, to a room especially devoted for such mess. More on that later.

Entrance to living room

Upon entering the front door one is practically tripping over the stairs, probably looking at mess on the stairs, (I couldn't help myself so I cleaned up a little for the photos) the mess spilling out of the closet, the bathroom and two small entrances to either side of the house-living room on right and dining room on left. We'll start in the living room, which I actually decorated to my taste and generally like. The living room is about 15' x 21'. We had the recessed lighting and woodwork added. It's a hallway to the family room in addition to being a living room, which impacts the layout, but overall it is a comfortable place to entertain or just sit and read one's iPhone in the morning.

Living room feature wall/staircase wall

The changes here will be minimal but the wall with the painting will be opened up on either side of the painting, on the right with a pass through to the kitchen/bathroom/basement stairs and on the left an opening to the staircase, intended to add better sight-lines and overall integration between the kitchen and living room.  There is a chance this could prove to be too expensive, because it is the main support wall for the upstairs, but we're hoping. My vision is to center the chair/painting vignette within two framed openings. A girl can dream.

Living room towards family room

View from entrance towards dining room

The opening to the right of the painting will be our "hack" at connecting the family room to the kitchen. Currently one has to go up the four stairs, walk through the living room, front hall, dining room and finally arrive in the kitchen (or bathroom for that matter). I know that houses with a circular flow generally work better so we're hoping this has a bigger overall impact than shaving a few steps off one's trip to the loo. My concern about this is that it would look ugly from the living room and doesn't really connect the family room to the kitchen. However, the view will be of a pretty, shiny new kitchen, not the dilapidated old one, and this solution is about 99% cheaper than building on to the back of the house. 

Dining room and kitchen

So back to the main entrance and to the left is the dining room and the one south-facing, sunny window. The dining room, when cleaned up, looks ok, has some nice antiques and goes well with the overall feel of the home. However it's way too small, we need to get leaves from the basement even to have a couple extra people over, and it's a hallway to the kitchen, which is constantly clogged and congested.

Yellow walls will be gone! View facing into kitchen

Again, I cleaned the table up for the photos, but notice the panini press on the server and the generally claustrophobic proportions. The room is 11' x 11'.  All the furniture will be sold. There will be a comfy cushioned dining bench towards the double windows in the front and a rectangular table. It's hard to see in these photos but the dining room bumps out four feet towards the street so the table will be tucked in, making an inviting but kind of roomy nook. Since I can't really connect to the family room my goal is to make another satellite family room in the kitchen. Everyone ends up there anyway, so they might as well be comfortable.

Bench seating and rectangular table will be against windows

To me the key to this renovation is taking out not just the non-supporting wall between the kitchen and dining room, but also the wall to the hallway, which requires a beam,  adding a mudroom, to control the clutter and opening the wall to the living room to provide the house with better flow. I've always felt that doing the renovation half-way would be a classic example of throwing good money after bad - meaning, it would still be expensive but would only solve about half the problems. It would still be small, cluttered and disconnected from the rest of the house. It seems improbable but there was no half-way solution that made any sort of sense to me. As I said, I've put hundreds of hours of thought into this.

Kitchen will extend to about the middle of the glass cabinet

I also had to find the right contractor, which I now think I've done. Jason Leveille seems to really understand what I want and encourage sensible ideas. His first drawing was exactly what I asked for (for those of you who have been there, it's a recreation of the Cape kitchen, albeit without a view of a quaint bridge over a constantly changing tide), not the peninsula most people think is more efficient. I just felt immediately comfortable with his process and pricing. He itemizes everything on an iPad as we speak. Of course we haven't really started yet so we'll see but so far I'm impressed.

OK-on to the kitchen. Yuck. Almost no countertops, cabinets or square footage. It's dirty, falling apart and full of chipping paint. These photos don't actually look that bad, but I did clean up, and the problems are more functional than aesthetic. Give me more space!

1950s era kitchen -wall will house
pantry, wall oven, fridge, door will be removed

All this will be gone and replaced
by an island with a sink and dishwasher

Future coffee/wine bar

We can't really all fit at this kitchen table, although I do love the versatility of the stainless. This dishwasher is only a few years old but doesn't clean well and takes 3 hours. It also leaks into the floor. I have stuff all over the counters because of a lack of storage. The stove cooks so unevenly I just don't make certain items any more, because I can't stand burning my fingers from moving hot things around a tray over and over. It's also too small for two big pots at one time.

Surprisingly functional pantry.
Far wall will become a pass through to living room

The fridge is big and cold, two excellent qualities in a refrigerator but doesn't have water in the door, and finding things in the freezer is quite the challenge. If we weren't renovating however I'd never replace the fridge at this time.

We don't have enough storage so I created a pantry in the basement stairs landing, which in actuality I'm kind of bummed to give up. But I'm assured that the pull-out cabinet pantry will hold double this amount of food in an easy to find manner.

View on porch towards garage door

Storage and counter space aside, by far my biggest gripe is the claustrophobia this kitchen causes me. I tend towards claustrophobia in the first place, so this isn't entirely the kitchen's fault, but the kitchen has three doorways and is the main way out to the back porch/recycling/bathroom/basement. I'm always bumping into people and shooing my kids out of there. In a sense, between being so distanced from the family room and having no space for the kids in the kitchen had this project been done years ago I probably would have been a much more connected mommy. I only have a short time until they really want nothing to do with me, and in the case of Natasha I may have missed the window completely. 

Location of new mud room
(under current overhang and out 3 add'l feet)

Future mud room

So along with the better space and storage in the kitchen itself we'll also we'll have an actual mud room off the back. The mud room is a funny thing because several male contractors derided it as a waste of money and every mother I know is obsessed with the idea. No matter how many baskets, buckets, shelves trays etc. I put out for boots, papers, coats and sports bags the only real way to get those things out of sight is to put them in a separate room. Dave and I are guilty of leaving things around as well. In this case it's kind of a bummer that the mudroom will be off the back but if we can get people to go in through the garage it could work, and if nothing else, in a pinch, clutter can be thrown back there to clean up for guests. The dog bowls and dog food will definitely be moved!

Behind that greenery is a walk out basement door,
making any rear addition complicated.

The back of the house is a conundrum because it would be lovely to just build a big three story addition back there, and not reconfigure all the existing rooms. However, this is just beyond our price point and not happening. Of course I'm summarizing years and years of thought and consideration but that's the conclusion we've come to. We would certainly get more square footage per dollar if we expanded out back, but the cost overall is just too prohibitive, and frankly, I don't need a fourth bedroom. I am concerned however, at the idea of overspending on a three bedroom house. There is a resale ceiling for a house with only three bedrooms.

Existing hallway problems

I detailed this in the front entry section, but here are some photos of some existing problems in the center hall. These photos give me hives.

Basement and bathroom doors
smashing into each other

Overflowing hall closet

Family room

Living room towards family room

Family room study nook

The family room is relatively functional, although the lack of walls makes furniture placement difficult and it is rather separated from the rest of the home. For years the only furniture we had in this room were Thomas train tracks. Eventually we caved and had a high def tv installed, once the prices became reasonable. Even after the tv and couch were added there were also a good couple years where it was an indoor soccer pitch. Thankfully some basement rearranging resulted in a downstairs soccer pitch. 

Family room towards living room

Tellie

Dave uses the study nook a lot as he works from home three days a week. 

The family room is far from the kitchen. It is also very orangey oak. However, this room will not be touched during this renovation. We need to draw the line someplace. In a sense I kind of like having the family room off in the back. It means that we really do entertain in our living room, so it's not sitting empty, and our cozy family space is kind of private. However, right now it's so private it feels like a second house. I'm really hoping the pass through to the living room, which will be right outside the entrance to this room actually helps. I will note, I have never ever in 10 years left something cooking in the kitchen and gone into the family room without forgetting about said cooking item and burning it. For this reason I am completely disconnected from the family when they are in there.

The people who built the family room back in the 1980s actually didn't intend it as a "family room" but rather a library. It is alluring when you walk in - almost two full stories high with floor to ceiling book shelves all around and a huge Palladian window, but it does not connect to the kitchen doesn't have a lot of usable floor space.

House Plans

Early version of plans
(mudroom will be bigger and
holes cut in staircase wall-not on plan yet)

Phew...that was a lot of typing. Other posts won't be this long. Preliminary plans to the left, including an entrance vestibule I didn't talk much about, but is meant to make the entrance less cramped and more gracious. You won't fall into the staircase upon entering, and there will be some closet space there too. There is a small chance this part of the project will get scrapped for foundation reasons. Also the mudroom off the back will be bigger than pictured.

If you made it this far thanks for reading!