Changing the Floor Plan

The first thing I do when walking through a possible renovation project is determine just how bad the floor plan is and what can be done to remedy it. Is it as simple as moving a few interior walls or are there structural considerations to take into account. If the floor plan tweeks require structural changes I'd be more inclined to pass on making an offer unless the seller is willing to drop the price enough to make things pencil out. In the San Clemente house there were some noticeable layout issues that were immediately apparent upon walking in the door. Below are the original layout and the revisions I plan to make.

Original Layout

Revised Layout

The first issue was the lack of a hall coat closet, something that many people overlook until actually living in a house and it subsequently bugs them until the day they move out. In this case I could see I'd be able to borrow some space from the generously sized bedroom next to the entry door to carve out a closet. Taking space from the bedroom also allowed me to work a built in desk/office setup in the bedroom which is nice because I work from home.

The next problem was a biggie and probably was a huge turnoff to prospective buyers who had seen the place - the kitchen was shut off from the family room and was inaccessible as well. To get into the kitchen you either had to walk around from the dining/nook or via the laundry/mechanical room. With most people nowadays embracing an open concept home, being able to open up the kitchen and improve the accessibility was a must. Fortunately there was an easy fix - knock down the wall separating the kitchen from the entry and add a large kitchen island. Making this change adds an eating area at the bar and allows someone who's cooking to participate with the goings on in the family room. The only possibly challenging aspect of this is that the kitchen/family room is built on a concrete slab (the rest of the house is over a crawl space and garage due to a sloping lot) and I'll need to jackhammer up part of the floor to run the necessary plumbing and electrical. One thing to take into consideration when messing around with a slab is to find out if it's "post-tensioned", meaning it has sheathed steel cables within it that are pulled tight after pouring the concrete to provide strength to the slab. Accidentally cutting one of the cables wold give you the surprise of your life. I didn't see any indication of the tendons on the slab edge outside and I believe this house was built before post-tensioning became a viable method so I doubt there will be any surprises here. Just an FYI - in homes built today, if it has a PT slab there will be a stamp on the garage slab indicating that.

Post tension stamp - located in the garage

In the case of this house the last major consideration was whether or not there was a true master suite (bedroom, bathroom and ample closet). Unfortunately, while it has 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, the layout was such that there was no true master suite and there was no way apparent to me to revise the plan so I could retain all three bedrooms and still have the generously sized rooms we desired. One lesser consideration to take into account was that we both want a master shower that was large enough to not require a glass door/glass surround as we both hate squeegying them and the glass still looks terrible after every use despite your best efforts. Add to that a nice 3/8" glass door/surround is hugely expensive so eliminating it entirely saves not only time and energy but money. With all this in mind the decision was made to incorporate two of the bedrooms into a single master suite, something I probably wouldn't have done if the house was going to be flipped later on (The appraiser our lender used on this purchase values bedrooms at $25k each so deleting one isn't a decision to be made lightly). But since this part of town is aclectic and we're going to live here we decided a great master with the features we wanted was more important than a small 3rd bedroom. With the extra space I was also able to add a 2nd vanity to the bath and as we both can do without having a soaking tub we decided to save money by not including one. An even bigger bonus was I was able to carve out a niche in the bedroom for Beth's huge Mexican armoire, which took 5 guys to get into the house we're currently at.

Heavy *^$%$^*# Armoire

The only limitation I feel I wasn't able to address was adding stairs from the garage (which is located under the master suite) into the house. There simply wasn't room. We'll still have to walk outside to get into the garage. Oh well.

One sidenote is that if you're interested in doing this sort of thing, the software I used to create the floor plans is relatively cheap, has a quick learning curve and saves countless hours per project. Drawing with the computer is vastly superior to doing drawings by hand - changes are easy to make on the fly and the software can pretty much do everything. I purchased software called "Home Designer Suite", it was $100 and can be downloaded right off the net. This version has most of the features I want although the professional version ($500) has everything a person could ever desire. Maybe someday I'll upgrade. There are free design software programs out there but the ones I tried all were seriously limited in their features and functions.

So that's the process I use. Walk through the house, determine it's limitations and then figure out how much it will cost to fix them, if they can be fixed. Knowing things like this can help you get a hidden gem and hopefully prevent you from making a huge financial mistake.