I’ll soon be meeting with the architect regarding the addition that we’re building on the back of our house. That addition will include a new master bedroom, laundry room, and family/media room. At the bare minimum, those are the three requirements.
Here’s what the current floor plan of our house looks like. The two grayed out rooms are the ones that will be torn down to make room for the addition.
We’ve been talking about this addition for years now, and that’s given me a whole lot of time (probably way too much time) to spend mocking up various floor plans and trying out different ideas. One of my earliest attempts had a hallway wrapping all the way around the current hallway bathroom like this…
It’s funny to look back at those very first plans. The pantry I had planned back then was just over half the size it ended up being. And I had no plans back then to turn the garage into my studio. Lots of things have changed over the years!
But regarding that wraparound hallway, the house I grew up in (and where my mom still lives) has a hallway that wraps around like that, so that’s probably why it felt comfortable and familiar to me. But in reality, that’s way too much space dedicated to hallway that could be better utilized for actual living space. And the longer we’ve been in this house, and the longer we spend using a relatively small guest bedroom as our main bedroom, the more I realize that I need that valuable area for space that we actually live in.
Specifically, I want a huge bedroom. I’m so tired of trying to squeeze Matt’s wheelchair or Hoyer lift in a small bedroom (and those things always make a bedroom feel smaller than it actually is). I want space. And lots of it.
Our guest bedroom is 11’4″ x 15’10”, which is actually a decent sized bedroom except that I then carved out space for two built-in closets, plus the fact that a wheelchair-bound person always requires more space to move around. So with those considerations, that makes this room feel very small to me.
So I’m really looking forward to having a huge master bedroom.
I tried so many floor plans over the years, but after a whole lot of thought, I finally decided that keeping it simple was the best plan. I eliminated as many hallways and doorways between rooms as possible, and just went as simple as I could. Here’s the plan I’ve had for quite some time now, with the addition in pink.
That plan gives us a new bedroom that measures 18’5″ x 20′. That sounds amazing compared to what we have now!
So I’ve been settled on that floor plan for probably two years now, but now that it’s time to actually meet with an architect, I’m starting to second guess myself. One reason may be because I haven’t really re-visited this floor plan since Matt and I have started opening our home up to guests. We have people over quite often now, and I plan to only ramp that up even more once our addition (along with a big deck in the back) is done. So I’m trying to think through not only how we use our home when it’s just the two of us, but also how we use it when we have a crowd over.
We only have so much room we can work with when it comes to the addition because (1) there’s only a finite amount of space between the far left wall of the master bedroom and the side wall of the pantry that these things have to fit between, and (2) we can only build out so far (about 20 feet) because we don’t have an unlimited budget. So the entire addition will measure 50′ x 20′.
Now that we use our house so much more for large-ish groups, one thing I’ve been wishing we had room for is a dining room, or at the very least, room for a dining table and chairs in our family/media room area. But with the laundry room and walk-in closet, plus needing an open traffic area from the front rooms of the house through to the back door (and room enough for a wheelchair to pass through easily), I didn’t think there would be enough room.
And that desire to make room for a dining space is what got me second-guessing my need (or even my want) for a huge walk-in closet. I’ll be honest, I’ve always thought that walk-in closets are a big waste of space (for me!). I’ve never dreamed of having a huge, fancy closet that’s basically the size of a small bedroom, and I’m just not that into fashion anyway. If I have room to store a relatively small capsule wardrobe, I’m fine.
What I’ve always loved is a wall of built-in cabinet-style closets. And in a bedroom that’s 18.5′ x 20′, I’m pretty sure I could find space for something like that, and still have plenty of room to move around. For example, I’ve had this image saved for years…
I absolutely love the look of built-in closets flanking French doors like that. And that room looks pretty small. Our bedroom will have over 18 feet of space where I could have built-ins and a French door.
Here’s another bedroom with a while wall of built-in cabinets/closets…
There are countless examples of this type of built-in cabinets/closets on Houzz, and I just love how these look. For the way Matt and I live, I think these would work much better than having a huge walk-in closet.
So if I were to find space in the bedroom for some built-in closets along those ideas, I could eliminate that walk-in closet altogether and tuck in a dining area in that space and enlarge our actual living space even more.
I’d keep the bedroom the same size and add some closets in that space, and keep the laundry room where I had planned for it to be. But eliminating the large walk-in closet will free up space for entertaining.
This isn’t set in stone yet. It’s just something I’m tossing around in my head right now. But the more I think about it, the more I love it. I know this seems unfathomable for some people. It’s all about personal priorities, and there are some people who would do just about anything to have a huge walk-in closet. And if I were a fashion blogger (that thought makes me laugh ? ), or if I were more into fashion, that would probably be very important to me. But I’m perfectly happy with a small capsule wardrobe and having more room for family and friends in our home. That’s a trade off that makes me happy.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
