Adventures in Renovation

Last week I finally made decisions about how the walls with look. First, screw conventional resale value ideas... The wall for that small bedroom is going. That room is just way to small to be of use to anyone and it messes up the whole flow. It was 7 x 12 when I took the closet out. And if anyone wants it later, they can always put a new wall up. Easy.

I made a sketch of what it's probably going to look like upstairs with that wall gone and a half wall by the stairs. The bathroom is going to look like a little box.

After I had made that decision it occurred to me that if I could move the bathroom wall one foot farther, then the door to the bathroom wouldn't be blocked by the bathtub and could swing inward. A seemingly simple thing that would just make a lot more sense. But the problem with that is the waste pipe for everything runs right behind the toilet, down to the basement and up to the roof to vent. So if I can't move the toilet back and it would be a huge pain to move the waste/vent pipe. And because of the window it's hard to move everything around in there.

Now if I had a lot of money and time on my hand, the right way to remodel the upstairs is to move the bathroom to the middle of the house upstairs. Then you make a big room in the back and the front and a hallway running along side the bath. Here's a sketch.

So it looks like I'll probably leave the bathroom as small as it is. Honestly the size of the bathroom doesn't bother me. I've rented plenty of houses in Baltimore with tiny, skinny bathrooms and they work just fine.

This will make a lot more sense if you look at my current floor plan. This is a before and after.

Also, I finally came up with a plan for the bedroom wall. I came up with a couple ideas for putting a window in but they all just looked kinda boring. So I decided what I needed was something more dramatic. Now the window is going to run the whole length of the wall. And I think I've found a way to run the electrical through the wall too. I did an elevation in Illustrator to plan out the stud layout. Now we'll have to see if it works.