Beach House Video Tour & Floor Planning: a house log

Thanks so much for all the sweet and excited comments over on IG & FB about our needs-plenty-of-enjoy beach house project (for anyone who is like whaaaa??, here is that post to get you up to speed). As promised, we are back with the rundown on the floor plan, and what we are right now thinking we are going to do with it. Warning: we have been known to change our minds – so this is simply the plan thus far. This house is like a giant iceberg that floated into our lives, and we are simply at the tippy top of the thing, waddling around like excited penguins.

But before we throw a bunch of floor plans your way, how about we walk around the house together in the form of a little video tour? We recorded this on our first visit after we officially closed on it, so you will see all of the lovely leftovers that “conveyed” with the house. It is fairly rough looking, but strangely sufficient, that simply brought in to our excitement (and we made a few lively “discoveries” during our archeological dumpster-filling digs).

Also, Sherry is making me acknowledge the Invisalign elephant in the room, er, video, which is that you can hear her slighltly altered voice since she has two hunks of plastic encapsulating her teeth. There is more on that in a few podcast episodes if it leaves you wanting to know more about her mouth (Episodes 20 + 21).

NOTE: If you cannot see this beach house video tour (due to being in a reader), click through to our journal post & it’ll be right here. So annoying that it hides like that.

So now that we have walked around, let us do some aerial exploring. Below is an approximated floor plan of the house that we made in photoshop (so it is not perfectly to scale or anything, but you get the idea). It is around 1,800 square feet and right now has two official bedrooms, although we were feeling generous and labeled a third below because it is essentially simply missing a closet. We were also generous in labeling the extremely rough enclosed porch spaces as “bonus rooms” (these are spaces with hand and even head-sized openings in the siding to the outside world). So yeah… they are not exactly “countable square footage” in their current condition. Perhaps none of the house is, come to think of it, since it is not right now heated/cooled and is also without plumbing and workable wiring…

The floor plan is fairly good to start with, but mostly could use a better kitchen and more sleeping space. Ideally, we’d enjoy to carve out sufficient space for two families to stay (like ours plus a guest family), assuming kids can bunk together and use sleeping bags/air mattresses like we do when we are at my parents beach house. That is all part of the lively.

Luckily, before we put in our offer, we were able to tour a nearly identical house next door that had already been renovated. Based on what they had done, this was one of our first ideas for updating our floor plan:

We numbered some of the key changes:

1. Mudroom. Whereas the neighbors had reverted their enclosed side porch back into an open side porch, we thought it would serve as a strong mudroom to catch sand and beach gear with plenty of towel hooks and shoe baskets. It would also give us a spot for a small utility closet to house a stacked laundry unit and a water heater (most likely behind bifold doors).
2. Open Floor Plan. Since the wall between our kitchen and dining room is already half gone, we figured we’d take down the rest of it, which is also what all of the other neighboring houses we toured chose to do (good news: it is not load bearing).
3. New Wall Upstairs. By shifting this long load-bearing wall a few feet to the right, the neighbors were able to finish the upstairs bonus room into an additional bedroom.
4. Main Bedroom With Attached Bath. The neighbors also converted the front storage room to an en suite bath for the front bedroom. We also liked the idea of a larger closet.

That floor plan in fact felt fairly spot on initially, but little by little we realized some shortcomings:

• Kitchen Walls. For one, we were struggling with the kitchen layout because we had quite little wall space in the rear of the house, mostly thanks to the back door (the neighbors simply have a window there), the back staircase (some neighbors have took out theirs, we’d like to keep ours), plus a low window and bathroom door in the way too.
• Plumbing Costs. A plumber estimated that it would be around $4-5K more to put that bathroom in the front of the house since there is no plumbing on that half of the house so there would be a lot more materials/labor involved. We were unwavering about needing two full bathrooms upstairs, so he advised us to try to carve one out much closer to the existing upstairs bathroom (ideally behind it or next to it).
• Pass-Through Bedroom. Lastly, we did not enjoy the lack of hallway upstairs, meaning there would be a lot of walking through others’ bedrooms to get around (anyone in bedroom #2 or 3 would have to walk into someone else’s bedroom to access a bathroom). But on the flip side, we worried that adding a hallway would simply waste space and make everything darker/more cramped. So much second guessing!

BUT THEN (plot twist!) a neighbor in one of the other near-identical houses invited us over to check out her place (remember there are three others that look nearly exactly like ours). And that changed everything for us. It had an upstairs hallway!! Exactly where we were thinking about adding one! And it did not feel dark and closed off – it felt strong! That A-HA was sufficient for the rest of the lightbulb to go on in our heads – and we arrived at this floor plan, which we are right now working off of:

There is a lot going on there, so let me break it down for you one floor at a time. Let us start upstairs, since the hallway revelation is what got us here in the first place. Existing floor plan on the left, new plan on the right!

So here are the most noticable changes:

1. Hallway. By adding one new wall through the old Bedroom 2 (based on our neighbor’s measurements) we can create a comfortably sized hallway and still leave sufficient space in the remaining bedroom.
2. Hall Bath & Bunk Room. We will split the upstairs bonus room into two “cozy” but functional rooms. The hall bath will be right behind the existing bathroom’s plumbing (jackpot!) and can be accessed by everyone upstairs without trapsing through someone else’s room in the middle of the night. The bunk room is not an official 4th bedroom, but we can fit two built-in twin beds in there – we are envisioning something like this – making it a strong, lively space for kids to sleep in. We can already picture our two fighting over the top bunk.
3. No Closet. Bedroom 3 is essentially becoming the main bedroom with an attached bathroom (and it is own private staircase!), but in order to create a flat wall for the bed, Bedroom 2’s closet had to go. We have a pleasant solution for replacing that closet, but we still have to figure out the Bedroom 3 closet situation. It may be a wardrobe somewhere. TBD.
4. Closet Wall. Since Bedroom 2 is fairly long, we will install a wall of closets on one side (likely an Ikea system) to more than make up for shortchanging Bedroom 3.
5. Storage? Reading Nook? We will still be left with this small room on the front of the house. The neighbor (with the hallway) uses it as a storage space, which we may find we need. But if not, we’d enjoy to do something lively like this down the line.

And now we will turn our attention downstairs (again, current on the right – revised on the left):

1. Kitchen / Dining Swap: The main difference down here is moving the kitchen to the middle of the home. There is a pleasant big wall to put cabinets on, plus it’ll give us a spot for a big island. Then we can float a dining table in the back of the house, sort of like a cozy breakfast room that is frequently located behind a kitchen (we might even add a bookcase full of games and books back there, which could also be played/read around the table).
2. Kitchen Design: We have not in fact designed the kitchen layout yet, but this shows some general placement ideas. The sink in the island will allow the person at the sink to look out those two big windows on the right side of the room, rather than facing a wall.
3. Utility Closet: As mentioned before, we are planning to add a stacked washer & dryer plus a water heater in the mudroom. Preferably behind some bi-fold doors to keep them concealed.
4. HVAC: There is right now simply storage under the stairs, but an HVAC professional in fact suggested putting our first floor unit in there – which we enjoy because it gets it out of the way (and does not eat into our mudroom area).

Hmmm, I am not sure “hidden HVAC unit” was the high note I hoped to end this post on – but here we are. In fact, where we truly are is at trying to get all of these changes priced out since things like “foundation repairs” and “new roof” are not exactly in our wheelhouse. So feel free to cross your fingers that it all goes well and only costs a finger and a toe as opposed to a whole arm and a leg. There we go. Ending on a dad joke. It feels so right.

P.S. Seems like shopping season is upon us, so for anyone looking for holiday gift ideas, we have you covered right here – and for anyone who’d like to see the home decor, furnishings, and accessories that we are digging, we collected all of our go-to rugs, chandeliers, bedding, kids stuff, and more right here.