I (Katherine) have spent the last six days mostly horizontal, for I have been sick. On our last day in LA--which, much to my astonishment, I did not hate--I started having sore-throat-ness and runny-nose-ness and body aches and fatigue, and by the time we got home I was a mess. I have been asleep most of the last few days, when I wasn't coughing or blowing my nose. I'm sure it had nothing to do with all the So I have not been knocking down any walls, to say the least. I thought this might be a good time to go back a step or two and look at the planning process, which we didn't blog through as it wasn't very photogenic. Everyone will be shocked to learn that Jen got obsessively detailed about making the plans. As you might be able to see in the photo, she made scale drawings of the house, and little scale cutouts of our furniture, and moved everything around until she was completely happy with how everything was.
Our full plan is to basically knock everything down in the garden level (which you knew) and rebuild the center of the house so that it's full of bathrooms. (If you click on the picture, you'll get an enlarged version that is probably more comprehensible. What it looks like now is here, if you're curious.)
There will be a bath and a half on this floor, plus a gigantic closet where I can live when I'm bad. (Or, maybe, when I'm very good.) We've (very cleverly, in my opinion) put pocket doors in strategic places that will allow a sort of shifting configuration and access to the tub/shower combined with privacy for everyone.
Then, once that's all squared away, we'll move our stuff downstairs and knock down the wall upstairs.
What we're basically creating is a huge open space with a galley kitchen on one side. We'll delineate kitchen/living room with flooring and furniture, and we'll have a big rolling island near the kitchen, and a dining table near all the fabulous huge windows at the kitchen end. When we need to, we'll be able to move things around and put out a long table to seat the Mongol hordes. Oh, and we're putting another half-bath next to the stairs, where the hall has been blocked to make two separate apartments, because all those Mongols will need someplace to pee.
