The Dream

Originally, we wanted to add two bedrooms and keep the three we had: one for us, one for each of the boys, one for an office, and one as a spare (for the future... not for a baby, but for the other end of the lifecycle). We wanted to expand and open up our kitchen, expand the dining room, and have some kind of open family area upstairs, maybe with homework nooks in them.

As Architect David did his research, we found that some of what we wanted needed to be scaled back:

No five bedrooms... that forces the creation of a three car garage (like our present one is a two-car garage... right)... and that would take up too much of a percentage of the plot. So now the plan is that we gain two bedrooms upstairs for the boys, I get one of the existing downstairs bedrooms for my office, Lisa and I keep the master bedroom, and the remaining current bedroom gets converted into the stairwell. And we hope we won't be hosting a guest until Kyle goes to college in five and a half years (then I can move my office into an upstairs bedroom, and our guest can take over the office).

The kitchen is going to be HUGE.... and open to the living room with a ginormous island.... the only issue now is cabinet space (but David is working on that this week).

The dining room will be bigger... though not as big as we had envisioned, as we learned that we're only allowed to add 200 sqft downstairs due to the previous owner's early expansion of the west edge of the house.

The family room upstairs will be a huge open area, the largest in the house, and will open up onto a large deck as well. The homework nooks have been moved into the boys' room, and they'll have a Jack-n-Jill (er, Kyle) bath up there as well.


So far so good...

A Beginning

OK, so we're a little further down the road than just beginning.... but if we're going to get this blog moving, I'd better get started now.

Welcome to our Home Addition Adventure, as we expand our house by two hundred square feet and add a second story of over a thousand square feet, nearly doubling our fourteen hundred square foot home.

We've been talking about this addition for years... even got a re-fi four years ago... then a home-equity loan a year and a half ago... but with the passing of my mom just over two months ago, things began to move more quickly (the realization that either my dad or Lisa's mom would need at some point to live with us was harsh and just the kick in the pants we needed to move forward). The father of a girl in Kyle's junior high school band happens to be an architect and we first met with him just over a month ago (on January 23 to be exact).

We've been meeting with the architect David weekly for the past month, and we've moved beyond the as-built drawings, through sketches, through preliminary discussions of code with the city, to nearly finished design drawings (I'll talk more about this process in the coming weeks to get us caught up).

Last night we met with him to discuss the drawings... the second story is pretty much locked down. Last night we discussed some of the design of the master bedroom closet area and some kitchen tweaks... we're almost there...

Stay tuned as both Lisa and I write about our experiences... hopefully, they'll be painless!