This is a diagram of what we are doing in the downstairs. Existing walls are black lines, things that move are blue, red things are going away, new things/locations are green. The work goes as follows:

1. move the furnace ("(F)") and water heater ("(H)") out into the garage so that we can use the space they occupy for other things. The furnace in particular is something which people go "Why?" at, but we have to replace the furnace anyway (grr...), so we are just reinstalling in a different location about two feet away, on the other side of the wall.

2. extend the bathroom. There's a tiny shower in there now, but we want a decent bath. There is a bath upstairs, but it's too short and shallow and cold. By extending the bathroom we can get a reasonable sized soaking tub in here. The bathroom door moves too, and becomes a sliding (or pocket) door.

3. move the laundry area. This is the single most difficult thing, because there are pipes embedded in the concrete floor. The washer and drier are side by side now, but they are designed to stack so we will be doing that to fit them into the new space. We're also moving the utility sink.

4. close off meditation room. Jen needs a private space for her meditation practice, so we're using the space where the laundry area used to be for this. Part of this work is stopping up a floor drain.

5. close off office space. The office is in one of the upstairs bedrooms at the moment, so we're making a larger space down here for stuff to go instead. The access to this room will be under the stairs into the hallway; the door which would otherwise lead into the meditation room is going to be blocked off. There will be many power sockets and network wiring in here. Hooray!

6. rearrange cupboards. The hallway is lined on one side by some built-in cupboards. These are really great, but they're not deep enough. We are going to push the doors out about a foot so that they are more versatile. One of the cupboard units, however, will be converted into a bay for the freezer we currently have in the garage, and for other uses (eg cat box, laundry storage).

7. remove panelling. There is some excessively nasty wood panelling in the family room and what will be the office. We hate it. The walls in the office will be opened up to install the electrical in any case, and the walls in the family room will have new studs mounted on them, some more insulation added, and then be covered up with wallboard. We think this will prevent this room being quite so perishing cold in the winter as well.

And that's all the construction. Initially, we had thought that this project was going to take two months of actual building, but our contractor has set a schedule of 30 days. I hope it works out.

Posted by Dunx at April 30, 2004 11:35 AM