Drawing Up Whole-House Plans
Let’s just pick up where we left off, shall we! Or, actually, let’s back up just a bit:
The one thing all five of the design/build firms we talked to about our renovation goals agreed on was that, with our savings plus the amount of money we were willing to borrow, we couldn’t afford to do everything we wanted. Maybe that sum would have worked pre-pandemic, they each said sadly, but costs haven’t come down since mid-2020’s meteoric rise.
Our kitchen is falling apart, though, and there are a few other pieces we really can’t wait to do to improve our home. So the firm we hired - which will henceforth be known as The Firm - suggested we get a whole-house plan drawn up, have each component of the plan budgeted out, and then have decide how to phase the work based on what we can afford to do and what elements need to be done in concert while ensuring Phase 1 can be future-proofed so it doesn’t have to be re-done in Phase 2.
Over the last three months, we’ve received three drafts of each floor of our home, meeting between each to refine the design. I’ve been so impressed by how The Firm has taken what we want our house to feel like and how we want to use it as a guide for the physical changes that need to be made. We approved the final floor plans last week, and next week we meet for the first budgeting conversation.
The major complicating factor is that the back of our main and first floors are going to have to be completely demolished and then rebuilt. Most of these rowhouses were constructed with a rudimentary addition on the back; they were called sleeping porches because, before air conditioning, people would sleep there (rather than in the house’s internal bedrooms) in the summer to take advantage of the night breezes. You can read more about them in this Southern Living article - it’s fascinating! They’re all enclosed in the photo below from c.1920-1950, but you can see they all have windows running the width of the house which wouldn’t have been an affordable option in the original exterior brick wall that separates the house proper from the sleeping porch. I know of about a dozen rowhouses with sleeping porches that were never fully enclosed, and I actually follow a woman on Instagram who unenclosed her sleeping porch because it wasn’t in good enough shape to use as fully functional interior space and she decided she’d rather have two levels of luxurious balconies! You can see the process and finished product in her “Double deck” highlight.
We knew when we moved into our house in spring 2018 that our sleeping porches weren’t super solid; the inspector grimaced when he walked through with us as advised we not keep anything too heavy out there. In addition, the floors and ceilings are slanted and they’re both a step down from the internal floor they’re attached to. Especially since we want to remove the original brick exterior wall upstairs, The Firm confirmed that it would be better to demolish and rebuild the sleeping porches in their entirety than try to shore them up. It wouldn’t cost that much more but would be significantly sturdier and better integrated into our house.
The problem is, that means we can’t really just do the main floor or the first floor in their entirety as Phase 1. They’re inextricably linked because of the scope of the sleeping porch aspect of the project. So Jon and I are on tenterhooks waiting to hear what The Firm recommends when we speak next week! Stay tuned, dear readers - of course I’ll keep you updated.
