Sixth House Renovation Plan - The Great Room/Family Room

Hello there! So far we have talked about my plans for the entry, the library, and the sitting room in the sixth house. Today we are going to take a rather quick look at the great room/family room. There are not a lot of changes in the plan for this room. I thought about combining this room's post with the kitchen, however, I believe the kitchen, the original kitchen, the unusual kitchen, deserves its own post :-). So here we go with the family room/great room! Mostly images with a few notes on revisions for this post. As a reminder of where we are, the following are the listing photos of the great room/family room space.

This is the view from the front door:

This is the view from the fireplace towards the front door:

This is the view from the corner next to the sitting room entrance door:

This room will mostly have cosmetic changes. The structural changes are:

1. Remove the half wall between this room and the kitchen/eating area. My son is counting down the days until he can use a sledge hammer to take it down. We told him he could and he's been super excited about it every day since

2. Open up the stairs to the basement to make the basement feel more connected to the house. Once the renovation is complete our thought is that the basement will become the primary family room for us

3. Center the door opening into the sitting room, as we talked about in the last post

Here is my initial graph drawing detailing the changes with a couple of sneak peeks into the surrounding rooms:

Here are some of the drawings of the space from Brenda Parker, our architect:

I have marked up the listing photos to help visualize the changes, my drawing is far from perfect as you have no doubt discovered by now, hopefully these help paint the picture for you though as they do for me.

Here is the view from the front door. The doorway to the sitting room has been moved and the half wall has been removed (to the best of my ability):

Here is the view looking at the front door from the fireplace. In this photo I am trying to see what it will look like if we open up the stairs to the basement, center the entrance to the sitting room and remove the half wall. the light grey is meant to represent open space. I have also marked up our plan to replace the current front door with French doors.

This is the view from the sitting room towards the kitchen. This is really just to show the elimination of the half wall. This might be the best drawing of the post lol.

I showed this view from the kitchen into the sitting room, looking through the great room/family room, in the last post. I have added some more scribbles to try and visualize the changes to the room in opening up the stairs.

And as a wrap up, here are the minor changes (although opening up the stairs is probably not exactly minor when it comes to construction) noted on the original blueprints:

This room will be more exciting to talk about, I sure hope, when I start looking at the decorating of it. Next we will look at changes to the kitchen. There is a lot to talk about and look at in there, I hope you continue to follow along.

Thank you for spending some time with me today,

Kerry