No.1 Master Suite Renovation

We are getting our house ready to welcome a new little bundle of joy! We have officially started our Homestudy process for adoption & are so so excited!

Check out the new fixtures, here!

We had some tough decisions to make financially while trying to decide what was the best course of action for our family going forward.

When we bought the cottage, before we were married and long before Em, we knew it was a solid investment because of the growth in the area. We planned to live their a few years, sale, make some money, and move on to the next house.

In the over 4 years since we purchased though, the growth has been even greater than we ever imagined & we had built significant equity in the home. We brought our baby home from the hospital here. She took her first steps. Prior to that we did a total renovation on the kitchen & it’s exactly what I wanted. Before the kitchen we met our very best friends who happen to live just across the street.

We joke often that if we were to ever move, we would have to just build houses next door to each other.

So here we are, four years into owning our home, 3 years into our marriage & just shy of two years into being parents we found ourselves at a crossroads.

Do we sell? Do we keep it as an investment? Do we want more land? Do we still want the convenience of living downtown & close to our business? Do we have the space for more kids? How do we want our child to grow up?What do we want in retirement?

After a lot of different ideas about what was the best decision for our family, we decided we wanted to be debt free! We decide this was hands down the best thing we could do for our family.

For us being debt free meant taking this home that we love and tweaking it just a bit so that we can turn this into our forever home.

With interest rates being so low, we decided to take advantage and refinance our 30year mortgage on a 10year note! Saving us almost a 100k over the life time of the loan.

Because of the equity we had built in our home we were also able to take out an additional bit of cash to move our master downstairs! This allows us to make the upstairs the perfect little kid space!

The Good Stuff

the real reason you clicked on this post! here are a bunch of before images for you to enjoy, while I tell you a little about the project. Our house was built between 1890-1900, and it has no hallways. before any of the renovations, if all the doors are opened you could run a complete circle through the downstair, running through every single room. there were a lot of doors.

The Space

Downstairs we have two bedrooms seperated by a full bathroom, sort of like a jack and Jill but only one sink area. When we originally bought the house to access the only downstairs bathroom you had to walk through one of the two bedrooms.

Bedroom No. 1

Bedroom No.1 is going to become our master bedroom.. but not before some major changes. There is truly nothing i love more than taking something down to the studs! We are deleting the two closets and the window between them! This will become the wall for our bed. Stay tuned for a fun little extra we are adding in to this room!

{a quick aside: the first renovation: the kitchen was tiny and cramped. we knew to make the kitchen what we wanted we would have to get rid of the second bedroom door that was in the middle of the kitchen. we also knew that eventually we would relocate the master downstairs (current project). so while some people thought we were crazy for deleting this doorway.. i had a plan!}

Bedroom No.2

On the right side of this picture you can see the old doorway and the back of the kitchen Sheetrock, our kitchen sink is centered right in the middle of the old threshold. This room is so odd, honestly it was odd before we closed up its main entrance. it had access to the back yard & to the den, buy only by way of a bathroom & another bedroom. Once we sealed of the doorway, I used it as my office.. then the dogs room.. then my office/dogs room... then our closet when we made Em a big girl room (Story for another time) .. this room was lost and sad but oh it’s going to be magical once we are done! This is the future home of our fully finished master closet!

The bathroom

The linen closet - see how it was organized, here!

The Plan

We are keeping the general flow of the space. Bedroom No. 1 will be the master bed & Bedroom No. 2 will be the closet.

We are deleting the linen closet to make a better space for the toilet. Bedroom No. 2 also has a closet that juts out into the bathroom, we are deleting it, which will open up the bathroom tremendously!

The bathroom had a clawfoot tub with shower combo .. it was the W O R S T. It was like taken a shower inside of a plastic bag. Since we want to keep the soaking tub under the window we had to find space for a dedicated shower.

Since we are turning a whole bedroom (No. 2) into a closet we knew we could sacrifice some space for the shower!

stay tuned for the demo!

xo- Kate