Y’all, over the last couple of days, I have had such a hard time focusing on anything other than our new floor plan. I was so excited about it, and so anxious to move forward full steam ahead, that I started making phone calls on Friday.
First, I called the guy who will take up the floor and subfloor in the home gym (soon to be our new master bedroom) and replace. He has done a lot of work on our house in the past, and I trust his work. He answered the phone, but was on his way out of town for the week and won’t be back until this Friday. And I’m sure they have projects in the works right now, so I have no idea when they can actually fit us into the schedule. I’ll have to wait until Friday to find out.
And then I called the contractor to schedule an appointment with him to discuss the kitchen addition. I was able to speak with him, but he was on his way out of town for vacation. So we scheduled a meeting for Tuesday the 30th.
It’s actually really good that they’re both out of town right now because that gives me time to calm down a little, let the “new” and the excitement wear of some, and allow me to approach these projects with a more rational and reasonable mind. Because these last few days, I’ve had just about as much calmness and self-control as a kid set free in a candy store. And we all know that no good decisions can come from that. 😀
I mean, over the last two days, my mind has been all over the place. I started out looking online for prefab buildings for my woodworking workshop that we plan to build in the back yard. I’ll share more details on that later, but for now, I just wanted to get an idea of the size and placement. So I took some spray paint, my tape measure, and a framers square out to the back yard to see what a 16′ x 24′ workshop would look like like behind the carport.
Just in case you can’t see that, I outlined it here…
I put it about 14 feet away from the edge of the carport, which I think is plenty of room to get a vehicle between them if I need to pull the van or a truck up to the workshop to unload plywood or MDF. I’m planning for the workshop to have wide doors on the side that faces the carport. Imagine something like this one from Home Depot, except that I also want a front door on the left side between the two windows….
So if you look on our landscape plan, you can see that concrete area between the carport and the workshop. The landscape plan shows two windows on the carport side of the workshop, but I want that to be big doors that open wide. And then on the side that faces the back yard, I just want a single door instead of double doors.
But I’ll share more details on that later. So from there, my mind went to our future kitchen, and I went onto the IKEA website to start planning our kitchen. It should come as no surprise that I plan to use IKEA Sektion cabinets for our new kitchen. I went from a being a huge skeptic to being a devout believer in IKEA Sektion cabinets during the time I’ve been working on my studio, so I’m already sold on them.
I spent hours and hours planning, arranging, rearranging, etc., working with the floor plan that I showed y’all last Friday. That floor plan looked like this…
And then, based on a comment from a reader that I couldn’t get out of my mind, I changed everything! Again, I won’t go into detail right now, but based on one suggestion from a reader (don’t ever say I don’t listen to my readers! 😀 ), I changed the floor plan and basically turned the kitchen 90 degrees to the left, so that instead of it being long and narrow with the length going towards the back yard, it’s long and not quite so narrow, with the length going side to side behind both the music room and the dining room. Here’s a glimpse. The door on the left is to the deck, and the door on the right is to the laundry room (what is now the pantry).
The new proposed kitchen is basically the same length as the current sunroom, but it’s not as wide. So once the current tiny bathroom and sunroom are torn down, and the new kitchen is added, the overall square footage of our house will go down. Here’s a look at the proposed kitchen overlaid onto our current floor plan as it is now, with the sunroom and bathroom that will be torn down shaded in gray.
But after working on that for a long time, I realized that what I should really be focusing on is designing our closet because that will come first. Again, I plan to use IKEA products, so I’ve been obsessively looking at any and all IKEA Pax wardrobe closets I can find online to get inspiration. And let me just say that after using IKEA’s kitchen planner (which is pretty amazing!), their PAX wardrobe planner is a huge letdown. I struggled and struggled to make changes, move things around, and in the end, I just had this mess…
I mean, what the heck, IKEA!? You can’t tell anything from that! Maybe I’m just not doing it right. But their kitchen planner is so easy to use, and has amazing 2D and 3D views, as well as technical drawings. This Pax wardrobe planner is nothing like it. I’ll probably have to end up just drawing this plan on graph paper. I really like that method anyway because I feel more “connected” to the design when I draw it by hand. And don’t even ask me to explain what I mean by that. 😀 I’m not sure I could articulate it.
So that has been my weekend. I know my mind will calm down eventually (it already feels like it’s calming down some), and I’ll actually be able to think through these projects in a calm and rational way. But over the last weekend, it was all still so new and exciting, and I was so anxious to get things going, that I felt so amped up all weekend, and my mind couldn’t stop racing. It’s been a fun and exciting weekend, but there certainly wasn’t anything relaxing about it. 😀
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.