In case you are wondering where Cabin to Craftsman is headed, I thought I should provide a place where you can view our plans. This is most likely NOT the final version, but it is the most complete set of plans we have, and it is what all of the contractors are working off of. I suspect there will be little “tweaks” here and there. We have already made some minor changes from what you see.
So, without further adieu. . .
I will start with the site plan:
Site Plan. This shows existing house and addition and garage
Renovated Residence is the existing house; the rectangle that is in between the garage and the deck. The fireplace does not exist yet, but that’s definitely one of our “must-haves”. And I’m talking a real, masonry, wood-burning fireplace. We know that’s the expensive route to go, but it’s what we REALLY want, and aren’t willing to compromise. There have to be some things that you won’t compromise on, and the fireplace is ours. Must come from being Yoopers. Anyway. . .this is the sky view of our forever home.
I should apologize for the quality of these pictures not being the best. Yes, in fact they kind of stink. That’s because I took pictures of the big set of blueprints we have. And, aha, I found out why they are called BLUEprints. Even though they are white, when you take a picture of them, it comes out with a blue background, which makes it impossible to look at or work off of. Here’s what the site plan looked like straight out of my camera:
Pretty yucky looking, isn’t it? So, I had to brighten, whiten, sharpen and try some other things with my somewhat limited photo editing software to even get them to a point where you can see them. Be happy you’re looking at anything at all!
More pictures. Here is a picture of the lower level plan, showing existing house, addition, and garage (by the way, if you click on the picture, it makes it bigger so you can see things better):
You can see (maybe) that the existing house is slab-on-grade, crawl space, and slab-on-grade again. This has posed some challenges, as we wanted a walk out basement. There’s a lot of expensive engineering involved in pouring a 9 foot basement wall right next to a slab and crawl space, hence the new crawl space in the addition. It’s needed to hold back the existing house from sliding into the new basement, to put it bluntly. One of the tweaks made already was that we were able to make the crawl space a little smaller, moving the wall closer to the existing house and gaining almost 3 feet of usable space. Yay! Usable space is good.
Here is a close-up of just the new basement addition, so you can see what we are adding:
Starting to get into the exciting stuff now! Every place it says “future”, is not really future. We are planning on working on everything at once, just slowly. Everything here should say “Slowly Added”! A couple tweaks to note. . .You can sort of see where I drew in the new wall that makes the crawl space smaller. We have also bumped out the wall on the right hand side two feet, and you can see where I have drawn that in. Smaller changes include getting rid of the outside door into the crawl space (too expensive because it would be custom), got rid of the window in the exercise room (the window well would take up too much space along the side of the house, where we already are limited), added a utility sink and washer and dryer hook ups in the “safe room”; which is really just storage, and the stairs have been reconfigured, but more on that later.
Here’s the entire first floor plan, existing and new:
And here’s a close-up picture of just the new addition, which is probably what you really want to see:
I guess we really haven’t tweaked much here, so what you see is what we will get. The big change is the stairs going to the basement. Instead of having them twist around like is shown, we wanted to be able to come in the front door and walk out into the dining room, sunroom, etc., without having to go through the kitchen, so the stairs will just be a straight shot down from the dining room, and there will be a walkway going from the foyer to dining room. We spent a lot of time “walking” through the floor plans so we could get an idea of the traffic flow, and that was pretty important to us. If you’ve ever been to our house when we are having a big dinner, things get messy in the kitchen and it would be nice to bypass that mess! Other than that, we did add the optional two feet out onto the porch.
We think we have a great plan! We spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted and how it would “work”, and the architects we worked with were able to translate our needs and wants into something that works. Yippee!!
Here are some pictures of the outside of our Craftsman home; pretty dramatic changes:
This is the lake side. The part on the far right, with the three sets of windows that step up to the middle – that’s our existing home. That’s it! All the rest is new. We are putting new windows in the existing part, so that everything matches. We are also residing the entire house, which is a MUST to go from cabin to craftsman.
Here is the lake side again, including the south elevation:
On the south elevation, you can see the sunroom on the far right, then working to the left, master bedroom, master bath, columns where the entry is, existing house, then garage. Not much more to say here.
Here’s a couple of the south elevation by itself, showing the detail a little more:
Here’s the west and the north elevation:
Just throwing this one in here so you can see the fireplace! Here’s a better shot of the west elevation, which shows the main entry. This is the elevation that faces the street:
In the west elevation you can see the main entry and the garage. The perspective is a little weird, because they look like they are right next to each other, but if you look back at the south elevation you can see there is quite a bit of house in between them.
And, lastly, here is one just showing the entry:
This is my favorite one! I like all of the detail and hope it looks like this when we are done! Just a note, the windows on the right are in the master closet (big, walk-in closet, I should add!).
So, there you have it. Our first meeting with the architects was in April 2014. It took awhile to get to where we are today, but we weren’t rushing. At first we thought we could whip up something and start construction in the summer of 2014, finish in the fall of 2014, and enjoy our new home over the 2014 holidays. Ha! But it’s good that we took our time. We got the plan we wanted and found a builder that would work with us. Each step takes time. Now the plan is to enjoy our new home over the 2015 holidays!
Cabin to Craftsman 