Even though I’ve shared every single step of the transformation of the part of our house that has now become our bedroom suite from beginning to end, I know that there are still some people who are confused about exactly how we got from Point A to Point B. Even though I tried to explain through a series of pictures, I completely understand that it can still be very confusing. If you don’t actually live in the house, and you’re not able to walk through the construction and see it in person, sometimes things get lost in translation when you’re just looking at a series of pictures.
I realized this this past weekend when I was catching up with a certain blogging couple that I’ve followed for years, and tried to get caught up on their current remodeling project that’s changing their whole floor plan. Even though I looked at every single picture, and I read every single description, I still couldn’t make heads or tails of it. And I just kept thinking, “It would be so much easier to understand if I could just see a floor plan.” I guess they have a personal policy that they no longer share floor plans of their house, though. I totally get that. Some people aren’t comfortable with sharing floor plans, especially if they have children in the home.
But I’m not shy about sharing floor plan. So for those of you who are still a bit confused about how we got from Point A to our current arrangement, I thought I’d try to clear that up with some actual floor plans of the different changes we’ve made through the years.
I’ll start with the original floor plan of this area of the house. Originally, this area seemed like an overwhelming mess. You can see the very large, rectangular hallway off of the entryway and dining room. Just inside the cased opening into the hallway, there were two closets. And then off of that hallway, there were three bedrooms and one hallway bathroom. The master bedroom had a small walk-in closet, and the other two bedrooms each had a small closet.
The very first update that I did soon after we moved into the house was the remove those two closets, widen the cased opening from the music room, and widen the doorway to the bathroom.
After that update, the hallway looked like this…
The biggest update came several years later when we decided to turn the original master bedroom into a master bathroom. In order to do that, we needed to square up the room for the master bathroom. That required the wall to be moved further into the hallway, creating a much smaller hallway. We also closed up the original door from the original master bedroom into the hallway, and then we added a new doorway from the home gym into the master bathroom.
That’s also when I decided to closet up the doorway from the guest bedroom into that little closet, and then open up both closet areas into the home gym. So this is the original closet that was in the guest bedroom…
And I closed that up so that it was no longer accessible from the guest bedroom…
And then I had both closet areas opened up to each other (i.e., I had the dividing wall removed between them), and then opened them both up to the home gym. That’s what gave me this wide, open closet area in the home gym.
But keeping that closet area is also what created this really long “hallway” in the home gym.
So in the final update, I had the closet removed to add more square footage to the bedroom, and then removed the doorway completely so that the bedroom and the foyer flowed together with no separation.
And that is what resulted in this open look. We still have this little “hallway” separating the bedroom from the foyer, but because those original closets were removed completely, this “hallway” area isn’t as long as it was when the room was a home gym with the closet area still there.
Hopefully that will clear up any confusion. Any time I post these before and after pictures on social media, I get the inevitable comments that say, “That’s not even the same space!” Obviously, it is. And I know that so many of you who watched all of this transformation take place over the years know that it’s the same space. And yet, I know that without seeing actual floor plans, it can be really hard to wrap your head around all of the changes that took place for it to look so drastically different from how it started. Hopefully, this will clear up any confusion!
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.