It was in our long term plans to convert the back half of our house into a space that allowed us to live on one floor. The three bedrooms and full bath upstairs have served us well as a family of five, but as official empty-nesters, my husband and I have been rethinking how we use our 1923 craftsman style Milwaukee bungalow. We'd rather not move, so we figured one day we would renovate.
Two years ago my knees started betraying me. I had to live for a few months on just the first floor of our house and it was difficult. I missed my bed. I had to join a gym to use an accessible shower. We decided to move the renovation plans forward about a decade earlier than we had imagined. We contacted Matt who built our deck, and before starting his own contracting business had helped install our new and improved kitchen ten years ago. He does great work, he listens to ideas without judgement and helps develop them, and is incredibly dependable. He agreed to put us on his schedule, and this year was the year. (Be warned that this was a big project, so this is a big post.)
As of this writing, the renovation work that began the demolition phase at the end of March is not completely done, but we're very close. In terms of disruption in our lives, that effectively began a year ago when we started moving things out of the impacted rooms in preparation. My home shop moved into the store building.
 | | Dismantling old shop space |
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| New shop space in our old teaching studio |
All of our books and entertainment media got piled into the dining room.
We got rid of bookcases and couches and emptied the basement and garage of small bikes and old paint cans and all manner of things that accumulate in every corner over the course of raising a family. It's been a lot.
We now have a shower, bedroom, and laundry all on the first floor, the basement got a cleanup and better lighting, and the garage even got better wiring while we were at it. And since there were already people like electricians on site, we even sneaked in a few little projects like finally installing a sconce in the front room that's been waiting in the wings for more than a dozen years.
Unfortunately the project ended up way over budget because of roofing issues. We have bought way too many roofs in our home-owning lifetimes. One for the old house, one for its garage, one for the new house, one for the violin store building, one for Ian's mother's house before we could sell it, and one for the cottage last year. So it shouldn't have surprised me that the addition at the back of the house which already revealed questionable construction elements when we replaced the deck off it a couple of years ago, had roof issues. Flat roof issues, which is a whole special category of roof issues.
The space above the old addition is a terrace that you access from a bedroom. Being up there among the tops of the trees is lovely, but the flooring has always been an unpleasant lumpy rubbery surface that gets hot in the summer. That surface had apparently not been doing its job for years and there were water leaks behind the walls downstairs. The whole project had to stop while the roof got fixed. This also involved removing the old door and window to the terrace and replacing it with a sliding door. It's a big improvement, but all of that displaced my oldest daughter from her room over summer break, which was more than a little disappointing. (She wound up in a bedroom in the violin store building among many cello repairs.)
In the meantime, the inside construction work is finished! Personally, I love design and construction before and after pictures, so it's fun to have some of my own to share.
Let's start with a room we called "The Nook" which underwent the biggest change. The Nook was a tiny bedroom off the kitchen and dining room.
It had a tiny closet, but it was too small to be a useful room, and too big to simply use for storage. We had a fold-out loveseat in there so we could put up guests, but it stretched from wall to wall and was not a comfortable arrangement. It was "school" space for one of our kids during pandemic days. The shelves held cookbooks and army things and random overflow books. The closet had hard to access electronic storage and the dining table leaf. Not a great room. It did get a new window several years ago when we replaced other windows along that side of the house, but everything else about it was goofy.
During demolition we got to see the quirky bones of the house and how not level everything was. There was a lot of sleight of tool, if you will, to make things look straight. It was fascinating when the walls came down to see across all the different rooms.
Things got shored up and framed in and it was good to see water damage getting corrected. It worked out that it rained heavily during much of the demolition phase, since every time it did we could easily identify any leaks. The roofers came out several times before Matt was convinced it was safe to do drywall. As much as I didn't want to extend our renovation work upstairs at this time, what a mess it would have been to do all sorts of beautiful new work only to have it ruined by leaks!
It was funny making decisions about the shower while it was open and exposed to everything for a while. That little bench is the shower bench.
Drywall is exciting, paint is exciting. Those are points that feel like progress after weeks of dramatic deconstruction where you can't help but wonder what you've gotten yourself into. The paint color in the main bathroom was called "Sand Dollar" and it looks different in every photo. It's essentially a beige with a peachy undertone.
Tiles, pocket door, shower progress... I love these tile hexagons filled with triangles. I went into the tile shop ready to quickly pick out something simple and clean looking, but then these triangles made me smile and I love looking at them.
The finished bathroom is so nice. I like the layout. I like the lighting. I like the grab bars in the shower. I'm looking forward to enjoying heated floors in the winter. What was tiny for a room, is plenty big for a bathroom. Matt and I went through at least a dozen possible configurations until we decided on this layout.
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(Not the final plan, but close) |
The tiny closet got expanded into a good size shower with a built-in bench. There is a heated floor, a built-in linen closet, a timer on the exhaust fan, a heated towel rack, a large vanity, a big medicine cabinet with adjustable mirrors, and a fancy bidet toilet with a heated seat and a remote control. The shower door swings both directions, which is a detail that sounds like it shouldn't matter much, but it's excellent.
The toilet is very tall, so I had to get it a step. But when my knees went bad enough two years ago that I had to go to Urgent Care, the place I got stuck was the toilet since my butt was lower than my knees. That's never happening in my home again if I can help it because its incredibly embarrassing. Tall toilet takes me into the future of being able to stand up from it despite stupid knees.
So, Before:
And After:
Next! Let me show you the hallway! The hallway from the kitchen to the family room included a broom closet, a butler's pantry that we used as craft supply storage, and a powder room.
The broom closet got better lighting, shelves and a new door. The most fun part about the new doors is not just that they work properly, but I found doorknobs I really like. I was torn between flashy clear, glass diamond knobs like I grew up with, or something in a basic black to match other things in the house. I ended up with black diamonds! It's like they are secretly flashy. They feel really solid and nice.
The butler's pantry space made room for a bigger shower, a laundry area, and a utility closet (which is where the cookbooks and basic household tools now live).
Old butler's pantry:
At its neatest nicest while in use, it was our craft area.
It did not stay like this for more than an hour at best. At its worst it was heaped with with things that were hard to wade through. There is a hazard to being creative. Every object has potential. It's hard to get rid of anything. Multiply those instincts by however many kids are around, and the craft area was untenable and not useful space.
The new utility closet is pulled forward into the hall, and the space behind it got used for the laundry area, and next to it for the shower.
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| Useful space! |
The powder room got expanded by a few inches, flipped its orientation in terms of plumbing, and is a vastly nicer space.
The old powder room was tight, and the door had to swing outward. The most annoying thing (besides the peeling vinyl trim around the floors that was hard to clean) was that the sink had separate taps for hot and cold water than didn't mix. That had to go. But we wound up saving several elements, including the original light fixture, and the medicine cabinet which had a old-fashioned slot for disposing razors into the wall!
Before:
For a little while, the old powder room was like an oasis in the construction zone so people could still use it rather than have the only bathroom be on the second floor. (The long period of having the only bathroom be upstairs did get me to bed earlier.)
Due to structural concerns, they ended up having to add another four inches to the powder room. I didn't want to take any space out of the family room, but it worked out great and I shouldn't have worried. The other room certainly doesn't feel smaller, but the bathroom feels bigger, and there's enough room for the door to swing in.
The finished powder room is much better. We chose a richer pale blue ("Lazy River") for the walls, and added a recessed storage closet (since there was space behind the breakfast nook). There's now a grab bar, the same fancy bidet toilet as the main bathroom, new window (which opens!), an exhaust fan (finally), a basket weave tile floor like I grew up with that I've always liked, and a sink that's an homage to the original tap handles from before that looks like it's doing jazz hands. We reused the light (hung higher), the medicine cabinet, and the towel bar, plus we added a floating shelf we already had lying around. The heat register got fixed up and moved from a different room. It's important to me to keep as many of the original elements of the house as we can, and keep it all in character with the original design, even as we redo things for our own current needs.
After:
The hallway itself got a wider entryway from the family room, which I didn't understand the point of in the original drawings, but makes the whole space feel more open and accessible. I love it.
Here is before:
Here is during:
And here's after:
The open space around the back entrance to the hall makes a huge difference to the look and feel of that whole area.
The transition from the hallway to the family room I think of as the Domino spot (with it's light and dark divide).
The family room!
This room always felt like it was obviously an addition. The moldings were different, the door frames were different, the windows were different, the whole feel of the space seemed tacked on in a more modern style, which I always thought was the 80s, but after tearing into the guts of the house a little, it may have been older. There was the skeleton of a doorway on the west side of the room which makes little sense unless it was there before our neighbor's house was built in the 50s. So who knows? The two back rooms were definitely added after the original design of the house, but they didn't fit, and they didn't work quite right.
So the family room got windows and moldings and framing that match the rest of the house, and much better wiring. The light switches in this house have never made much sense. Several places you'd have to walk across a room to turn a light on. There were no light switches as you walked in the back door, and the switch to turn on backyard lights was in a hard to reach corner. Now there are switches at each entry point of the room and two sets of backyard lights we can actually get to.
Our front entryway (which I use as a music room) is yellow on the walls and ceiling with white trim. We painted the back room to match, so both entry points are cheerful and bright. (And if you're hanging art, weirdly yellow goes with just about everything.) The color in this room and the family room is "Solaria," but I kind of regret not going with the very similar "Bananamania" because it's much more fun to say Bananamania. (Maybe we can all pretend I went with Bananamania.)
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| Front room |
Family room space before:
I'm confused why I don't have real pictures of the family room while we were using it. Probably because it wasn't my favorite room. We had a lot of bookcases stuck in awkward places that were likely not very safe. There was a TV mounted on the wall and a couch that never fit right but simply needed to hold a lot of people. For a while there was a treadmill. We had to have a floor lamp by the door since there was no access to another light source when you walked in.
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| Picture of the couch before we gave it away |
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| Bookcases that kind of blocked the doorway to the shop |
During renovation there was a always a lot going on.
After! With built-in bookcases! Also with better insulation and windows! This room used to get so cold I could chill my water bottle by setting it on the floor for a few hours in the winter.
We will one day be able to afford the right couch and blinds, and once the DVDs and books are finally organized we can move the TV back into this room, but we're taking our time. I'm sorting and deciding what we don't need (I feel like Riverside Shakespeare in tiny print should have a new home). I'm seeking less clutter and more visual calm.
At the moment, it's the perfect pretty place to sit with a dog and write.
I absolutely love this room. It's probably our favorite room in the house now. That blue chair we got used for $75 and it reclines and swivels, so in the day it's nice to lean back and face the window and look up at the trees.
During the renovation we moved the TV to the living room, which I'm not crazy about, but that is a better space for a crowd to watch a movie. We've decided not to mount the TV when we put it back in the family room since it's easy to move that way. We'll set up the family room viewing for just two or three people, and simply take the TV to the living room if we need to accommodate more. That may also work for times when maybe the kids have friends over and want to stay up late to play video games or do something noisy that involves the TV, and they can take all of that to the front of the house rather than be loud next to our bedroom.
Bedroom!
The new bedroom is going to be so nice! That's another room where we'll have to wait until the home equity loan is paid off before we can furnish it the way we'd like to, but there's no rush. We're just going to keep our current bedroom a bedroom, so no need to move anything.
The family room leads into the bedroom through a pocket door. The doorway between the family room and what used to be my home shop didn't have a door. I had to block it off when necessary with a baby gate.
The old shop room had a set of windows that I imagine were probably once on the back wall of the house and moved to this room. We heard a rumor that this space was once used as a tailor shop? It had its own side entrance, so I can imagine how that might work as a business. This half of the addition was very different from the family room half. The ceiling was lower. We found out during construction that there were two extra ceilings under there. Apparently rather than solve the source of the water damage above, people kept covering it up. There was what looked like an original window seat (under windows too high to see out of from there), the baseboards matched the rest of the house, but there was plastic crown molding.
And just inside the entryway was another door to a set of stairs that led out the side of the house. I never saw that door used. I don't even know if it could be opened. It had a creepy chain lock about a foot off the floor. I used the space as a shop closet. Behind the closet/staircase door was some difficult to access shelving.
Even though we knew logically that the family room and the shop were connected, it was still weird when the wall came down to see it as one large room.
They raised the ceiling, added a window, filled in the stairs, and replaced the outside door with another square window.
The wall between the bedroom and what was the stairway is now a set of three sliding doors that open into a closet. The color of the bedroom walls is called "Tidal." I originally chose something called "Oceanside" which had a touch of green in it, but the painter said that particular color was complicated to touch up, etc. Rather than go with a cursed color, I picked another one that was similar. I just want it to feel like nighttime in there.
The finished room is really lovely. The new small windows look the same as the originals but they can open. (I don't think I ever noticed until these were installed that the middle one is wider. Funny how your brain assumes things match because you want them to.) We have better lighting and a ceiling fan with a remote. I love the light from the extra window.
For the window in the closet we had a stained glass insert made to match the original windows in the living room that can be seen from the same side of the house to help tie it all together better.
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| Original living room window |
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| New window made by Cobalt Glassworks |
On the other end of the closet is the laundry. We went with an all-in-one unit, so it washes, then it dries, and when it's done it even plays a little song then pops the door open so nothing gets musty. There's even a soap tray that you refill every few weeks, so doing laundry pretty much means pushing one button and walking away. No load to switch. It wouldn't have been practical when we had small children and did laundry sometimes multiple times a day, but for just us? So nice. And with the laundry in the closet and next to the bathroom, none of it has to go more than a few steps to get put away.
I wanted the feel of the bedroom to the family room to literally be night and day. The family room is sunny and bright. The bedroom feels instantly calmer and like a good place to retreat to and sleep.
And since the bathroom connects to the bedroom through the closet, there is now a loop in the floor plan rather than everything being a straight shot from front to back. That's been surprisingly nice to have. (And the dog likes a good chase game through the loop.)
Lots of outside work connected to an inside project!
This is the view from the deck before the new window was added.
Before we redid the deck in the backyard, the fence ran along the entire addition side of the house. When we pushed the fence back, the neighbors were surprised to discover we had a door there. Once it became exposed, we had a problem with deliveries sometimes getting left there. There's no basement under the addition, just empty space beneath the floor, and we've had issues in the past with animals getting under it. Our old dog, Chipper, used to bark at the floor of my shop when something was under there. We haven't had an issue since that space under the old door got bricked off a couple of years ago.
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| Door be gone! |
Extra things: The kitchen floor got a refresh (since it's connected to all the nice new floors, and it needed it). There was paint refresh, and a few dings in the walls filled in. Matt also took some time to regrout the counters and fix some hinges and drawers.
The whole basement got new lighting, and the corner of it where I use my bandsaw got paint and a real ceiling. It's an icky basement, but less icky than it used to be.
The punch list also includes repairing a detached/rotted railing on the front porch.
There is no end to the things an old house needs, but I love this house. I want to leave it better than I found it as my part in its history.
The unexpected terrace work has been a lot, but will be an amazing feature to enjoy. Aden's room used to open onto the terrace with a terrible door that we had to seal with tape in the winter. The window was bad. The door had to go as it was one of the big sources of leaks below. The window and door together got replaced with a sliding door. There's much better natural light in the room now. I was glad I still had a can of paint from when we redid Aden's room not long ago.
The deck itself required removing all the siding from that upper wall of the house in order to run the roofing material up under it to properly work. They don't make that kind of siding anymore, but Matt found a close enough match.
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| Frequent checks for where water pooled |
The new flooring on the terrace is made of ipe. It's a tropical wood that is also sometimes used to make violin bows, so I know it's dense and can withstand a lot of wear. It will need to be oiled every other year or so to keep it nice, but it's so pretty! The last step will be to add a railing like the one on the deck below so that this space will finally be safe to use. What a lovely thing it will be next summer for my daughter to have this area right outside her bedroom door. I can imagine a little cafe table set and maybe some flowers.
So not quite done, but done enough to share. It's been a much bigger project than we thought we were signing up for, but it's come out far better than we expected. In order to truly guarantee that we're putting Matt's kids through college, we have a few other renovation ideas for the future, but not for a while. This was more than enough. He's pretty booked up anyway, so just like me at the violins store, he's not bored. But if you need a great contractor down the line, give Matt a call at Tamarack Renovations. We have nothing but good things to say about him and his work.
It's been a long stretch of having work people in the house, and making decisions, and moving things, and not being able to live the way we normally do. Definitely worth all of the expense and trouble, but I'm happy to see it coming to an end.
It's a lovely feeling to have your home be your favorite place. I don't take that for granted. (Thank you, Matt, for helping our home be just what we need.)
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