Check out our most recent ideas for what the heck we are going to do with our top floor and see what one experts thoughts are.
Here's the original floor plan for the top floor of the house. This floor has been totally gutted remember. Shoot I just realized that this diagram has incorrectly scaled dimensions, so don't pay attention to those...
Here's what the top floor looks like now-its gutted to the studs.
We've decided that we want to do the entire top floor as private family space. On this floor we are going to need to find space for;the master bed-bath, enough closet space for two adults, a kids bedroom-bath and a laundry room...plus as much random storage as we can pack in. We've added a dormer opposite the existing dormer and put our closets in it. We kinda like the idea of having windows in the closets. Not sure about the sizes though. Putting the bath were we did in the 'kids room' squeezes the size down but it still seems like a pretty good sized room.
We are giving a local arch. a try. He's a retired prof of arch from some university in OR which I can't remember right now.
Here's his two first shots at designing out the space. We don't know if we like the way he's turned the Master Bedroom into a turny-twisty path. We still are not convinced that we need two sinks. Why put the kids closet where it is when we have the closet in the hallway that can be used? Seems like we are squeezing down the size of the kids room doing it this way.
This idea is different. The closet in the middle of the room with the TV isnt something that would of occured to us.
The separate shower is interesting also. The toilet kinda recessed might be good too?
So what do y'all think? Got any great ideas for this space? If so we'd love to hear them.
Our pal and neighbor Ayse came up with this mix of ideas. Ayse had this to say
I was looking at your architect's plans and realized that a nice combination is this mix of the two: you get a nice long sight line through the upstairs. I'm attaching my cut-n-paste of the plan. You could also forgo the closet in the kid's room and just put in a wardrobe, or steal some of the space from that storage area right there (the low ceiling part would be a place for shelves and shoe
cubbies) to make a closet.
I like this configuration of the master bath better than the one with a separate entrance for the shower, but I would break the sink counter and add a wall with a frosted glass pocket door between the two "rooms" (shower/sink area and toilet/tub area), so you could have two people using both spaces to their fullest. And I'm not sure I see the purpose of two doors into the shower, but maybe that is an artifact from cutting and pasting; you could use that corner area as a closet or just widen the bedroom.
One thing I don't like is the shelf beyond the tub. My experience with such things is that they end up being dirty and hard to get to for any useful purpose (since you have to climb into the tub to get to the space). If the ceiling is too low there for the tub to move further west, I'd suggest you just box it in (a flush lightbox can make a nice way of making the wall more interesting). If it's tall enough, a small window there next to the tub would be cute. Actually, if you did a little dormer over the tub and scooched it west, you'd get extra headspace and more light and no dust shelf (that's what I heard a real estate agent call them!).
The toilet in a recess is not optimal -- you end up having to work in a tight space when you need to do repairs. On the other hand, it's a shallow recess and does pull the toilet out of the middle of the room.
