Sixth House Renovation Plan - The Sitting Room

Hello. The renovation tour continues today with the sitting room/den. This will be a relatively quick post as there are not a lot of major changes coming to this room. We talked in the last post about opening up this sitting room/den to the room next door which will become the library. Here is the listing photo of the sitting room/den:

When my older daughter and I first toured this house my immediate thought when seeing this room was to turn it into a sunroom by adding windows to each of these window walls above to make two full walls of windows. As we continued walking through the house and my list of renovation wishes grew and grew, I figured it probably was not worth the expense of adding several windows to this room. I did still know that I wanted to open it up to the study/living room in the front of the house though. Flow between rooms makes such a difference to the feel of a home, at least to me anyway. Here is my initial sketch of that:

After moving into the house the fact that the existing doorway from the family room/great room into this room (the vantage point where the listing photo was taken from and the opening shown on the right side of my graph paper drawing above) was not centered started to bother me. If at all possible, I really have a very strong preference for things to be centered - just ask John and our children what it is like to hang pictures and place furniture with me! Let's just say they don't like it as much as I do.

I changed my drawing a bit to center both sets of doors in this room. This leaves the doorway between the library and sitting room not centered on the library side. This will not bother me when sitting in the library though believe it or not! Since there will be shelves on two sides of the room and the fact that one of those walls of shelves will need to be built around a window and accommodate furniture placement there is already a lot going on to keep the eye entertained. Additionally, we will be building character into the room with the millwork and I can happily live with off-center and/or quirky features if there is character. Here is the next drawing with the sitting room doors centered, looks way better right?

Here is the listing photo marking the change of adding a door between the library and sitting room. The angle of the picture does not allow for a full view of where the door will be:

Here is the listing photo showing the entrance to the sitting room from the kitchen. I don't know why the doors were not centered in the room originally. Perhaps it is because of the pony wall (which is definitely coming down!) between the eating area and great room and they were centering off of that, here's to hoping that it is it and it was not because there is some major mechanical situation happening behind the wall to the right of the doorway!

Our last visual of the changes to the space - the marked up blueprints!

Alrighty, a quick (and hopefully painless) look at the changes coming to the sitting room. Next, we'll take a look at the great room/family room. I hope to see you there.

Thank you for spending some time with me today,

Kerry