This is a $5M remodel of a nice old house.
This house is magazine pretty, RE pretty, but a zombie house.
Just a superficial box to live in….that will frustrate the new owners, after they move in…
Let me show you what I mean… Hopefully the new owners the builder will Neve see it.
And the longer they “work around” the problems, till they just up and sell to the next schmuck/ sucker/ that can’t see all the mistakes.
This IS a problem
Lets’s start with the garage, right in the front yard…right up front. See the 3, count’em!, 3 car garage on the left?
In the next decade, we will be working more from home, than less…the world has changed. Our cars are NOT as important as they used to be.
This could have been a perfect home office, by adding more doors and windows.
The beauty of this wing, is hat it is separate from the main house, but “right there”. Clients can visit, and not intrude on the main house. When you need your husband/wife to watch the baby a minute… he/she is right there!… but NOT there at the same time….perfect!
2 bay doors can be opened up, entirely removing the walls on the very private back side of this area. and the 3rd car slot can be used for a laundry/utility/dog washing room…removing the pressure of these functions from the main house.
It would look like this…
So? where do the cars go?
Down around back UNDER the deck.
Right now the “basement is a vast windowless tomb where NO ONE will want to watch movies, do push ups, or drink wine…yet…this is where all that is stationed.
The deck as it currently is used, is has all the gutter water draining right on the deck, and down to earth. Really?
The basement also has a monolithic foundation of a useless fireplace…(in the era of decreasing CO2… are we really burning more logs for decoration…we are in the Deep South… ). The fireplace stack intrudes here, and on the 2nd floor as a strange bump-out destroying the flow of rooms up there.,
Good design is proper ALLOCATION OF SPACE.
If you are in a standard quarter acre lot, with setbacks, and height restrictions… you will eventually buck up against a size issue. Limits… and suddenly, you are pulling in walls and halls, in a subtractive nature, not additive… you are making a bedroom smaller, to give proper walking room to your closet, you are subtracting room from bedroom for the adjacent bathroom. This is a constant ..down to the inch compromise.
Instead of a massive living room or bedroom, carve off space for a pet room, cat room, laundry room, nursery quiet room.
Have a large enough closet, with 4 feet of space to walk, have large enough rooms, with good flow. It is a constant re allocation of space…. again, this does NOT cost more, it is just thoughtful, correct.
Finally, make sure your doors open in the right directions… My worst conflict is my dryer door conflicting laundry room door, so I have to do a constant dossy do, EACH time I take my clothes out…. AND make sure the laundry room door is at least 36 inches wide, to carry your laundry basket out, without twisting sideways thru the door.
The 3 car garage, should be:
the home office, and laundry
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
This goes a LONG way to moving the garage, UNDER the house, below street level…
Demo’ing the back deck, solves even more problems.
- The gutters draining directly on the back deck (you know, the path of mossy green slime that accretes over time…each time it rains, the water just floods the deck, before draining off to the land…the squishy land on the way to the pool…
- It lets LIGHT into the basement… that otherwise has NO windows
- It lets you demolish and extract the Darth Vador looking,
massive fireplace foundation looming in an otherwise light and bright area. - AND pays for the elevator, that brings the groceries, from the car in the basement, to the first and second floor… for aging in place living.
