With the garage pretty much wrapped up it was time to start preparing for the next big change, putting a slider in the dining room to walk out to the future deck! Here’s a rough floor plan of the original space using homestyler.com and I played around with adding furniture and flooring materials.
We had to discuss the future layout of the bathrooms during this stage because once the door was installed it wasn’t going to be moved again (obviously). I originally wanted to move the wall between the dining room and bathrooms one or two feet into the dining room to enlarge the master bathroom and make both bathrooms more equal in size. Here’s a rough idea of what it might have looked like with the kitchen opened up too (furniture placement a little tighter in the dining room).
Long story short Mace got his way and convinced me to leave the wall for a few reasons:
1. If we demo that wall then the bathroom renovations would be open to the whole house 2. He really liked the size of the dining room for entertaining 3. If we made the dining room smaller the furniture would be tighter to move around 4. We’ll spend more time in the living spaces than the bathroom 5. Bathrooms will never be huge in a smaller house
So the first “renovation reality” is that we (or me) had to compromise on making the master bathroom smaller than I originally wanted (still planning on moving the wall between them and equal them out) so this is what it will look like not moving the wall.
Once the plan of action was decided on we moved onto the fun stuff, shopping for sliders!! During the house hunt we saw a house with an 8 foot slider (6 foot is standard) that looked awesome so we knew that’s what we wanted. We taped off the window to get a visual of what it would look like in the space.
You can tell in the pic an 8 foot slider would actually require us to make the opening smaller. So we began toying with the idea of bigger sliders that would have 3 or 4 panels instead of 2 (guess after the closet doors we had a thing for the 4 panel look!). It was pretty much a smaller version of this one from Anderson.
But before we could move forward we had to investigate the existing window frame to see what kind of structure and beams we were working with to see what our rough opening size would be (and make sure a bigger slider would fit!). Turns out it was about an inch too small but Mace was working out a plan to make everything possible (my hero!!).
Another long story short we decided to go with the larger 4 panel slider for a few reasons:
1. We thought it would really make a statement and be a focal point in the house 2. It looked pretty awesome 3. We liked that the center panels allowed for a wider walk through opening 4. It was more $$ than we planned for, however to do a smaller slider it would require: a. Additional cost of supplies to close in the space inside b. A large amount of re-work to the siding on the outside c. Additional time and labor for Mace d. We don’t “pay for labor” but if you calculate what it would cost to pay someone to close the opening the cost between the doors didn’t end up being a significant difference.
So for us the trade off to spend the money up front was worth it so we could spend more time hanging out together. The slider would take 4 weeks to arrive but we had some prep work to do ahead of time, like getting rid of that base board heater!
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