“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” ― Benjamin Franklin

If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a planner. I can see my family, especially my mom and my husband, violently shaking their heads “yes” as they read this. Putting our plans on paper was frightening, though. I was worried once it was on paper, we couldn’t change it. Well, now that we’re a few months in, that’s very wrong (thankfully).

We knew we wanted to re-configure the entire first floor and add a master suite. When Rusty said he thought we could design this ourselves, I was terrified. As much as I aspire to be Joanna Gaines, I would probably flunk an interior design class. As I started walking about the stud bearing house, I was amazed how easy it came to me. Reconfiguring the first floor ended up being my favorite part so far! I’m now starting to want to go back to school for design!

Here is what we started with:

I started with the living spaces. I knew I wanted everything to be open, similar to our current house. I hate being stuck in the kitchen and unable to socialize. The kitchen/living room wall had to go! With that being said, that meant reconfiguring the already small kitchen. The old master/guest bathroom wall also had to go! To go ahead and fast forward a little, every wall had to go, including the front exterior wall.

The staircase was not up to code and had to be extended. We looked at several options but the best option (believe it or not) was moving the front exterior wall out to the edge of the porch. This made the living room and guest bedroom much larger. This also made the outside of the house look a little odd but I’ll talk about that more when we explore the exterior of the house.

An important thing to me is that my house is very functional and easy to maneuver. My guest suite was inspired by my Aunt Susan’s house. I loved how you could access the guest bathroom from the main living area and through the guest bedroom. Since there was no room for a half bathroom for guests, this was the next best option. This required the bathroom to move from the left side of the hallway to the right side.

Now, the master suite. I like things very symmetrical, so I decided to add the master suite by mirroring the garage on the other side of the house. This gave us a very large master suite. Part of the bathroom was included in the addition but was also a part of the previous master bedroom.

Upstairs walls stayed in place but we did tear it all down to the studs to give it a facelift.

What do you think of our new floor-plan?