Day ?-85- The 4 R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle & Retrofit

So I began with the first R- REDUCE the size of the 4th bedroom which increased the size of the kitchen and created a new hallway to the back yard. One of the reasons this house worked for me even though everyone thought I was insane was because it had a 4th bedroom...or as I saw it, an Office! In my previous house my office had always been open to the rest of the house- usually part of that second living/family room that no one uses for the proper purposes. Needless to say it is hard to get away from "work" when it is always staring at you. So essentially for this room I took at 12x14 bedroom and built within it a 9x9 office. It is small but cozy.

But with my change in plans to remove the side kitchen door and put in a new back door- kinda screwed up my office plans. It worked out great for my kitchen and I did have fun tearing down the wall...but now the shelf I was planning on using in there to hold all of my work library was now not going to fit...but I did have a great niche for built-ins...but that just meant more money being spent. boo.
My new office entrance is shown above (which eventually got a pocket door).
Here is the new built-in shelf niche below:
I wasn't sure how I was going to do the shelves but I had put my dad in charge of taking down the closet bi-fold doors in my bedroom and he had a brilliant REUSE idea...Can we reuse these bi-fold doors as shelves? And this is the reason I surround myself with smart people. And so we did!! We RECYCLED the doors as shelves and RETROFITTED them to fit within the niche.
They look pretty sweet and are now filled top to bottom with books...I even had to add more. And nobody can even tell they use to be doors, it is pretty sweet. Pictures to follow!

Day 17- Brilliant Ideas

So the great thing about working with great people is that together you can come up with brilliant ideas. I think sometimes you stare at something too long and you don't think past what you already had planned.

Once the walls were opened up completely and everything was actually clean I was talking with my contractor about what to do in Lucas' room because there was not actually a closet in his room. There was one right outside it, but I had always planned on putting a small closet behind his door because the space wasn't very useful, but my contractor said- "Why don't you just recess it into the wall?" Oh...well now that is brilliant since there is just wasted attic space. Problem being it was going to be short with the roof angle which probably wouldn't have been a big deal. But then we got thinking- why don't we take the hall closet and make an opening to it off of his room. There was just enough space for a 24" door to go into a "walk-in" closet that we extended about 3' into the attic space. So it got framed out that night! The shorter side is unusable for hanging clothes probably but it is perfect for rubbermaid tubs of old/future clothes. And I have a feeling that Lucas will turn this room into a pretty cool hang out while he is little.

Then in Lilly's room there was a closet already in place, but it had two large ducts (supply and return) running through the closet from the basement. These were added on when the upstairs was finished (guessing about the 50's based on finishes). My contractor asked why I didn't just change these ducts to flex ducts and run them through the attic instead? Again...brilliant.
So that is what we did! You can kind of see them in the picture below inside the closet, and then a 6" duct use to run all the way up to the vent you see at the top.
Here are the new flex ducts back behind the closet.
Now I just need to fix the hole in the floor!