Design for Comfort

In my earlier post, I wrote briefly about what motivated us to do this remodeling. Basically, our primary bedroom has been in the basement all of the time that we have been living here, and we want to move upstairs. We want to merge the main floor primary bedroom and bathroom into a primary suite that makes better use of the space, and gives us a bedroom closer to the size we’ve gotten used to in the basement. Before we met with the Meadowlark designers, I came up with some ideas for how this could be accomplished, and being the geek that I am, I built it in 3D modeling. I started by modeling the current layout of the bedroom and bathroom.

There are some issues with this layout. Firstly, the bathroom wastes a lot of space by having a door to the hallway. The toilet, sink, and bathtub are all at one end of the space, and the other half of the bathroom is used for little else than to provide a path to the hallway. Second, the bedroom doesn’t have enough space to comfortably add a couple of dressers to the king bed and nightstands. It seemed to me that one problem could be used to solve the other problem, so I tried it out in the 3D model.

The tub became a more spacious shower because we don’t really use a tub. With no space used for a door to the hallway, the space was added to the bedroom for a new closet. What had been the closet became a space for a couple of dressers. I showed this to the designers at Meadowlark, not to say, “This is what we want,” but more to convey what we want to accomplish. They then took our ideas and wishes, and came up with several designs for us to choose from.

We also had some ideas about fixing up our kitchen. One problem with our kitchen was that the dishwasher door was in conflict with the oven door. Apparently the dishwasher had been added by the previous owner without much forethought about its placement. Moving it to the other side of the sink would solve that. Of course that means tearing up cabinetry, so replacing the cabinetry led to replacing the countertops and… well, you get the idea. I had also long imagined replacing the railing that separated the kitchen from the dining room with a sort of breakfast bar. So we let the designers know about all of that as well.

The designers made 3 proposals for each space, and options for the surrounding spaces, writing it up with costs so we could decide exactly what and how much we wanted to do. The following diagram was the result of me taking what they had as plan B pulling in a scaled back element from plan C.

Here are some sketches that were made April 21, though changes to the plan have been made since then.

That is basically the plan moving forward. There were lots more details and choices to make along the way through the design process, but I can save that for later. I’m eager to see how all of those choices look when they’re done.