Forgive my nonexistent architectural and artistic skills, I’m doing my best here!

The basic layout of our house (not to scale) looks like this:

Downstairs:We’re making the following changes:

Existing living room will become the formal living and dining room.

• Features of the living room:
  • Beautiful cathedral ceilings
  • Brick fireplace
  • Sunken portion (very small)
  • Big windows at each end (lots of light)
  • Open to foyer with railing around sunken portion
• Our plans:
  • Fill in sunken portion (too small to be of any use, though our son wants to use it as a ball pit!)
  • Add wall with coat closet in place of railing (this will make the foyer smaller but it’s worth it!)
  • Remove carpet and lay wide, dark planks
  • Remove popcorn ceiling (ugh!)
  • Add spotlights all along ceiling
  • Add bookshelves on either side of the front window

Kitchen:

This is a biggie. We’re taking down the partial wall that separates the kitchen and breakfast area to create one long galley kitchen, moving the doorway to the kitchen so that it is parallel to the front door (with a pocket door to hide a messy kitchen if we need to!), and putting in all new cabinetry, flooring, and counters. I’ll be able to explain better when I post pictures!

We’re also planning on pushing the laundry room into the garage for a bigger eating area (there is currently a sliding door in the kitchen next to the mudroom – that area will serve as our breakfast room). I’ll lose out on a nice big laundry room but I’d rather have a roomier kitchen!

Family room:

This will be our playroom. We’re adding a toy closet under the stairs in Harry Potter-esque fashion. This room will also double as an office – not ideal, but we only have so much space…

Garage:

The garage is staying as-is (maybe with added shelving). Most people with the same model have converted the garage into extra living space but my husband NEEDS his garage, so it’s staying! Our “someday” plans include an extension on the garage so that we can create more downstairs and upstairs space.

Upstairs:

Again, this is not accurately scaled but you get the idea.

We’re not doing any major changes up here, mostly cosmetic and closets.

• Adding bookshelves in the hallway along the wall of the baby’s room
• Adding linen closet at the end of the hall between the two bedrooms
• Adding closet in main bathroom
• Removing popcorn ceilings
• Changing horrible light fixtures (and possibly medicine cabinets) in master bath
• Replacing closet doors in all bedrooms
• Replacing shaky stair rail that is not up to code and scares the wits out of me
• Painting and carpeting

So those are our plans for now! I’ll post pictures as soon as I can get over there – we’re having record-breaking low temps today and I don’t want to take the baby out. Stay tuned!