If you have been to our house, you have seen our awkward laundry room/garage/master bedroom situation.  We bought the place knowing we would have to do a major remodel to make things make more sense.  You see, our master bedroom is attached to the back of the garage.  And there is no connection to the main house.  You have to go out the laundry room, into the garage, then out the back door (to outside) then through the master bedroom door.  Awkward!  This past week we started phase one of this remodel and its complicated.  I will try my best to guide you though whats happening.  Its pretty exciting.  Here is the entrance to the master bedroom from standing at the  kitchen back door.  You can see it shares a wall with the garage but technically no matter which way you go, from the kitchen or the garage  you are still walking outside to get there.

Inside you have a super narrow tiny doorway going from the kitchen into the laundry room then a door out into the garage. This photo was taken after the garage floor had been raised, you can see the sub-floor plywood.  You are looking from kitchen, through laundry room, into the garage.

That being said, hopefully the general floor plan is understood.  Here is the new floor plan for the remodel.  When finished, the picture you just viewed (above) will be looking from the kitchen, down a long hallway leading to the master bedroom. In the plans below you can see how the back of the garage space will be taken up to form a hallway, utility closet, pantry and bigger laundry room.

First step was to clean out the back of the garage and remove all the mess the previous owners left.  Shelving, lots of nails, dirt, spider webs and any of our stuff we had been storing there.  The wiring was clearly not done with any organization in mind.

Pretty clean in the next photo below, we also took down the shelves as well as the light.  This is the back of the garage space we were looking at from the kitchen a few pictures ago. Next I took some chalk and drew the basic plan to get a better idea of what was going to happen.

You can see what part of the back of the garage will get swallowed up by the remodel.  But you can also see how we will be able to walk from the kitchen, down the hallway and turn to go into the master bedroom.  Just follow the arrows.  The back door from garage will go away and that few extra feet there becomes a bigger laundry room.  Remember that teeny tiny doorway out the kitchen?  The hardest part of this project is making that teeny tiny doorway full size to have a standard width hallway. It doesn’t sound that hard to move a wall unless the wall needs to be where a water heater currently sits.  Plumbing and electrical make this little move a HUGE deal.

As you can see, then new wall runs right where that 1991 huge water heater sits.  To make matters more complicated, the heat pump is sitting barely in view just to the left of the water heater.  That could not be moved, at all.  We had to work around the heat pump. The future site of the water heater is the small circle in white chalk about a foot from the current position.  This space will become an interior closet accessible from inside to house the water heater and heat pump and maybe my mops, brooms, etc.  We will refer to this as the “utility closet”.  We found a great contractor to help us out on this one.  Its just far too time consuming.  As awesome as we are at DIY, we just don’t want to do this one ourselves.  First day of construction Todd (who is great) framed and built the new floor in the new space as well as future utility room.  Here in wet Oregon a black vapor barrier is always added under houses.

After the floor was framed, sub-floor and insulation was put in.  Basically as much as he could do before the plumber and electrician showed up.

There was some concern that a water heater from 1991 may not work once it gets moved.  While its functioning great right now, it seemed like a good idea to replace it.  The new one is narrower and fits better in the utility closet anyways.

You can see now how the floor is the same height as the rest of the house, the water heater is on the opposite wall was before and all the plumbing and wiring has been moved.  Soon, that wall on the right is coming down and moving to the left a foot. After the plumber came and did his part the electrician was here.  He had to move our wall heater in the bedroom.  We still need this for now until central heating/air from the main house is connected to the master.  Luckily in Oregon you can live without air conditioning 99% of the year.  The wall heater had to be moved because its current location sits right where the new doorway into the master bedroom will be.  That is the door that will go from the new hallway into our room.

Thanks to snapchat I can draw you a great visual representation of how the heater was moved and where the new doorway to the hall will be.  Again, small changes in this remodel get super complicated as everything that was here was right in the way of everything we needed to do!  (Yeah, that 80’s paint color needs to go as well! Soon enough!)

So after the first week of construction we have a new floor and have moved every major plumbing and electrical object that was in the way.  Starting Monday the real fun begins and finally walls come down.  The current laundry room wall on the garage side comes down, the entire wall from the teeny doorway to the garage will come down and a door to the master bedroom will get cut out.  Now I am excited!  I will update this post next week as more things happen.

And here is your overdue Layla cuteness just for fun.  She didn’t nap much this week with all the construction.  

xoxo