Permits
Ok- so once we had our plans, we were ready to get started - but needed permits. In DC, you need a permit to do just about anything to your house, including changing faucets or switching out an outlet - so this major renovation definitely qualified. So we reached out to some architects to draw up the plans so that we could get the permit. We talked to a few, one who never followed up with a quote, and two that quoted $8-$10k, just for the drawings. Since we already had some rough drawings from our previous architect, this felt ridiculously expensive. So, eventually, I decided that I could just figure this out myself.
For the kitchen, I measured the room and then just used the Ikea Kitchen Planning Tool to drag and drop the appliances and cabinets around until we had a nice layout. For permits, we needed both the current and the proposed layouts. We also needed an electrical diagram - which I googled, and determined was not that big of a deal - so using powerpoint, I made little diagrams for outlets and lights, and dragged them into good spots. I did a quick google of electrical code and found out important stuff - like all outlets at counter height need to be GFCI, you need outlets every 4', and the big appliances need their own dedicated circuit. I wrote all that in the electrical diagram, and took it to the permit office. Surprisingly, with only a couple small changes - they approved it and we were ready to go!
kitchen electrical diagram - no, it's not pretty, but it's good enough!
Changing Plans
I thought our plans were pretty final already, but when we started reaching out to contractors things inevitably started changing.
Master Suite Layout
For the new bathroom, the plan had always been to have the shower and tub outside on the old sleeping porch. We installed the windows and skylights based on this plan. After a couple plumbers came to look at it though - and saw that the sleeping porch has a cement slab for the floor and is on the other side of an exterior brick wall - we were convinced that it would be too hard to move plumbing out there. I reconfigured the layout to put all the plumbing inside, ditching the tub. I started to come around to the new design, but it had some major flaws. The new skylight would be weirdly off-center, and the area where the shower would have gone, would become an awkward walk-in closet or maybe a gym, kind of wasting the space. We got quotes for both options, finding that it wasn't much more expensive to put the plumbing outside, but that we couldn't have pipes on the exterior walls as planned. So we ended up with Plan C - with just a shower and toilet out on the old sleeping porch, and the vanity inside, with the skylight centered nicely. This also allows someone to be using the sink while someone is using the toilet or shower, and gives us room for a bigger walk-in closet. My only annoyance with the final plan is that the exterior window was purposefully placed off-center based on where we thought the shower and tub would go - so now the window could be centered and bigger. It's not worth fixing, so it'll just something to bug me.
master bath floor plans
We also played around with the closet layout a lot. The current closet in the bedroom is long and inaccessible, so originally we wanted to just remove the whole thing to make the bedroom bigger. That would involve patching floors and sheetrock though, so then we debated just expanding the doorway into double doors so that the whole thing was more accessible but cheaper. Spouso didn't like that there would still be two entries into the bedroom or the idea that the bedroom wall would just be covered in doors, so we came up with a new option that closed off one of the doors, creating a new hall closet. This seemed like the best balance of maximum storage space, but it still doesn't leave any good walls for furniture, so we have actually tabled this discussion for now and will revisit. There may be a new Plan D under development.
master bedroom closet plans
As I explained in length in my last post on this - our plan was to do most of the work ourselves, just hiring the trades directly without having a general contractor to oversee the whole project. So I started meeting with electricians and plumbers to get quotes. Every single one of them was fine as I talked through the kitchen plan, but when we went upstairs to talk about the bathroom they just glazed over. It was clearly too much. One guy told me explicitly that he wouldn't do the work that way - the bathroom was just too complicated and needed a GC to manage it. So, then we started talking to GCs about doing the whole project. This of course is much more expensive (and why I wanted to avoid it in the first place), so the estimates were totally blowing the budget. After some back and forth - we finally settled on a halfway option. The GC will do most of the project, leaving us to finish up some things like paint and the office flooring. While this isn't quite as cheap as I had originally hoped, it will be much faster than doing it all ourselves.
Cabinets
In our original plans, we intended to use Ikea cabinets for a couple reasons: they're cheap, they have a million different options, and they are meant to installed by home owners, so we could do it ourselves easily. But, our contractor encouraged us to use another company that makes cabinets of slightly higher quality, but fewer options. We expected the price to be roughly the same, so we got on board and started adjusting our floor plan as needed. We were all fine with the new option, until his final quote came in for $9k, roughly twice what we were expecting and could get from Ikea. So we decided to switch back to Ikea, thinking we could buy nicer doors, and that contractor disappeared completely. I guess we changed our minds too much for him. So we reached out to the contractors we used years ago on the basement renovation, they connected us directly to a cabinet company, who gave us a quote around $5k - almost equal to Ikea in price, but much better quality - so we settled on that. It won't be exactly the perfect layout that I wanted, but the quality will be better and we won't be stuck putting together a million Ikea cabinets.
Prep, Packing, and Purging
Once everything was finally falling into place and ready to get started - I started freaking out. I realized that between both projects, basically one half of our house was going to be completely torn up, so all of the furniture and things in those spaces needed to be moved somewhere. I created a temporary kitchen in the dining room with just a few basic dishes and pantry items, and critical small appliances like the coffee maker. I also moved my super tiny wardrobe out of my closet and into the greenroom to share with Spouso. Everything else got sorted through, and either sent to goodwill or packed up and shoved somewhere in the house. I tried to be really critical about what we were keeping, but at some point we just started shoving things wherever they could fit. The house is already a mess, and the work has yet to start.
Anyway - after months and months - we are finally ready to go. Demo starts tomorrow. More soon!
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