I know it won’t be the last, but we encountered our first change of plans today. I took my laptop to the boys’ music lesson to try to make plans for the renovation. I am using an app called Planner 5d. I basically recreated a 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional blueprint of the existing house, so I could observe and rearrange in a way that made sense to the overall flow of the house. Also, I loathe wasted space of any kind in a home. So, my goal was to eliminate some of the smaller walled-in areas and turn them into something more inviting and more functional for the family.

That’s when it hit me: the second bathroom could [and should] be a master bath! That doesn’t mean guests and kids can’t use it, but it does give the option for privacy and allows us to take out a hall closet and tiny hallway to put up a single wall, thus creating an office nook for Superman to work from home. It was a perfect plan! The bathroom already shared a wall with the bedroom, and we were able to get rid of a wasted space that needed to go.

I got Superman on board, which didn’t take much convincing, and we took a look at what needed to be done. This is where we got our first bad surprise. The wall separating our room from the bathroom was supposed to be a load-bearing wall. Sometime in the 70’s, there had been some more extensive renovations done, including the removal of the support the wall once provided to the upstairs. Yikes!

In more than one way, this find turned out to be a blessing in disguise. First, there was a stud that was taller than the rest that was actually pushing up the second floor floorboards. Having the wall opened up allowed us to trim the stud and flatten out the upstairs floor. Second, we saw a huge problem that was in major need of correction, so we got to work correcting it!

Before we could put up a new wall, though, we needed to get rid of the rest of the things that shared the existing wall. Time to swing the hammer again!

And clean up again….

change of plans

finding the floor

layers