Starting a home remodel can be an incredibly daunting process. There’s so many moving pieces and questions, it’s hard to even know where to start. And the biggest question right off the bat is how to plan your home remodel!
I’ve remodeled two of my homes here in Austin, acting as the general contractor for, let’s say, 1.75 of them.
Today, I thought I would discuss the specific steps my wife and I went through, along with our (best) Austin architect, to come up with our finalized set of remodeling plans.
Obviously, your project will likely be very different. Nevertheless, when paired with our home renovation ideas, I’m hoping it might be instructive to see the changes in our actual floor plans, revisions, and talk through how we went from (what we thought) was an awesome idea (#Arrogant) to a completely different set of plans better suited to our goals!
In fact, I’d argue that even if you think we made terrible decisions, that’s totally fine. If you’re planning a remodel with a partner, feel free to make fun of what we did together. Seriously! Even that conversation can help you form a joint vision for your own plans.
So let’s get into it…
The Checklist
The first step, that served us well in planning both remodels, was coming up with a written list of major and minor priorities – the important things we both agreed our home should have.
Creating a list together enabled us to have a clear picture of what each other was expecting, and allowed us to negotiate/compromise before we started trying to get into the actual nitty gritty details of planning the home.
Knowing what we each wanted from the get-go helped smooth out most of the major planning bumps.
To be honest, I don’t remember the list from our first remodel, so instead I’ll focus on our latest project. Here are our main priorities that we started with for our latest remodel:
- 3 bedrooms
- 2.5+ baths
- Mid century modern ranch styling (character we want to preserve where possible)
- Single story
- Up-to-date kitchen
- Generous storage spaces inside and out
- A home office for me
- Large primary shower
- Swimming pool
- Indoor workout space
- Ideally two living areas
- Solar system with whole house battery
- Guest bedroom
I know it seems a little reductive to specify some of that, but having a base to start with was incredibly important. For example, I was surprised how important it was to my wife to have (at least) the extra half bath for guests, and how, when we each really prioritized things, we each landed on “it’d-be-nice-but-not-required” for the guest bedroom.
(Sidebar: We live in a relatively expensive area of Austin with a mix of $600K+ post-War 2/1 teardowns on up through $2-2.5M new build homes. Given our budget, we were expecting to start with something like a 50’s 2/1 or 3/1, so, while it might seem ridiculous, specifying 3/2.5 for us made sense.)
As we go through the plans a bit, you’ll see how some of our priorities changed.
Start with a Concept
On our first remodel, we had a good list and went through two sets of plans before my wife had the lightbulb moment. Once we had her concept, the third set of plans was exactly what we wanted. (We were also younger and less picky.)
On this project, we both started with a concept we thought was awesome!
Essentially, we’d re-build with the original MCM roof pitch, nuke all that ugly brown (!), re-establish the carport, and sort of recapture the original breezeway concept by adding a glass hallway leading to a new primary suite behind the carport.
Versions 1-4
We met with our architect, and here’s his interpretation of what we told him (which is pretty accurate):
Now… Even seeing this months later, I don’t hate these plans. Nevertheless, in news that will surprise nobody, our architect had several other ideas, at least one of which was, unquestionably better!
Here are his first concepts based on what we asked for:
Again, it’s important to point out that our needs are likely different from yours. However, you can see similarities in each layout because they all included the main elements we wanted. What’s more, conceptually, his ideas were just better. (PRO TIP: Hire experts when you need them!)
Our layout created a weird narrow “courtyard,” while his plans actually re-established the breezeway, created a functional outdoor space between the house and pool, and separated the office space from everything else.
For us, having a giant dining room and kitchen at the front of the house, with a small-ish living area at the back didn’t quite work (even though you could see the pool!). His last concept we really liked, so we started working on tightening it up to better fit our wish list.
Fine Tuning the Details
Here is where having a clear idea of what everybody wants really helps!
While we liked his last concept as a whole, we didn’t love the U-shaped kitchen. We’re both concerned about having plenty of cabinet space, and we don’t love the limitations of corner cabinets. Also, we’re both weird about visual stuff, so the kitchen counter cutting into the room (at the “top” of the plan) was something we wanted to avoid.
In addition, we plan to keep our city issued trash and recycling cans at the “bottom” (in the images) of the carport, so we didn’t want storage blocking the whole side.
With two kids, having a sort of “drop zone” for their stuff coming in through the screened porch from the car was a priority for each of us as well.
And finally, given that we’re updating all the original ‘50s cast iron plumbing, we wanted to see what would happen if we expanded the hall bedroom en suite and added a walk-in closet to that room instead.
Version 5
Here’s where that got us:
The carport storage area was the right idea, but now too small. The “drop” space cut too much into the living room, and we didn’t like how the new bathroom/closet cut into the outdoor space between the pool and the screened porch/breezeway.
And I don’t know why, but I think the whole tub-in-the-shower thing is a fad that will go away in five years. (I could be wrong… ask anyone, they’ll agree!)
Version 6
So, making some of those changes we got to this:
The carport storage areas are perfect here!
Adding a closet to the office lets us count it as a “bedroom,” which should be helpful if we ever sell, and it makes that space more functional.
Instead of a room for our kid’s crap stuff, the architect added a built-in cabinetry section to the living room. This concept maximized the square footage, and met our storage goals.
He also added a “bump out” for the primary tub, and shrunk the primary shower.
Version 7
Since we are the ones GC-ing the remodel, at this point, the number of “bump outs” started to become a concern. The original structure is four sides stone, so each bump out on the original house (bedroom & kitchen) was going to require an extra foundation pour, and reworking the 60+ year old stone work.
And then the primary tub bump out just felt a little… too much.
Taking that feedback into account, and rolling back to the original ¾ bath en suite for the hall bedroom, our architect came up with this:
Guess who loves the en suite bathroom in the office – this guy!
We had some concern the kitchen would feel too “galley-like”, which was resolved here, widening the space considerably.
The primary bathtub bump out was reworked back into the shower, and the hall bed & bath set up is back to its original design.
At this point, we like the flow of most of the house, but we’re still waffling on the primary bathroom and closet space. This newest set of plans is the closest to what we’re each wanting…
Outstanding Items at This Point
At this point in the planning, our architect is seven revisions in (give or take)! And we can tell we’re getting close. The remaining questions at this point are roughly…
- Are we sure we want a tub in the shower?
- Is that primary closet sized how we’d like?
- Does that kitchen layout actually work for us?
- Are we really going to take an original 3/2 home to a 4/4? (Hint: NO!!!)
- Where’s the whole house battery going to go?
Well, for questions 1, 2 and 5, here’s a flow of how that went!
Versions 7-7c
Alright! Bathroom done.
As can see, it turns out the tub just wasn’t high enough on our priority list to make the cut. Our previous home had a nice soaker tub. I can count on one hand how many times we used it in 6 years.
We used the shower every day, and often wished it was larger. Having a large shower just makes the most sense for how we actually live.
Does the Kitchen Layout Actually Work for Us?
Only time will tell!
We did get into the house, measure and tape out the space on the floor. The kitchen peninsula falls very close to an existing wall, so it’s hard for us to be 100% sure. But, visualizing the space, we both seemed to think it would flow. (All of our previous kitchens had islands, so the peninsula concept is new to us. We’re not sure if that’s predisposing us to be biased against them!)
Finally, Are We Really Going to End Up with a 4 Bed/4 Bath House?
I already strongly hinted at this a bit above, but it’s a nice segue to the final section…
The Realities of Your Budget
So, we don’t have an endless amount of money for this project, and we’ve also set a pretty ambitious budget. (In Austin, let’s just say remodeling costs have gotten out of hand.)
When it came to keeping the bathroom in the office, we ran into… some limitations. Without getting too far into the weeds, the City of Austin has very specific guidelines on what can and can’t be done.
Going over a “three bathroom” threshold triggers extra requirements on the remodeling permits. In our case, it meant we’d have to update our city water tap, which crosses the street. At roughly $25K, just to update our water service, we just couldn’t justify the bathroom in the office. (It would have made a great guest bedroom or Airbnb space, neither of which we’ve ever needed!)
The Final Plans
After all of the main revisions above, here’s where we landed on our final set of plans!
Let’s see how we did on our checklist:
- 3 bedrooms – Yup!
- 2.5+ baths – Actually got three!
- Mid century modern ranch styling (character we want to preserve where possible) – For sure!
- Single story – Check
- Up-to-date kitchen – Yes
- Generous storage spaces inside and out – We think so!
- A home office for me – Yes
- Large primary shower – Yup
- Swimming pool – Got it
- Indoor workout space – My office will double as a workout room
- Ideally two living areas – So, we didn’t quite make this one… Theoretically, the office space could work as a “flex” space that opens to the pool also. It’s hard to say whether we’ll be able to make it layout that way or not. And, of course, we have the screened in porch which we hope will also serve as extra “living space.”
- Solar system with whole house battery – We’ve got the perfect closet for the battery right where city power will come in!
- Guest bedroom – Not quite
Conclusion
And that’s it!
Planning your remodel is incredibly difficult, for sure. If I could boil my main “how to plan your remodel” advice down it would be this:
- Hire an architect you jive with
- Start with a detailed, prioritized list of what everybody wants going into the project (I just outlined our main goals in this post – but our list includes details on down to tile, paint colors, and what we want rooms to feel and look like)
- Be prepared to compromise so that everybody can get as much of their list as possible
Good luck!