Broken wrist and all, my mom Jennifer has managed to (with the help of my sister Emily and me) measure every inch of the house and map out its footprint to-scale on graph paper. I can’t tell you how cool it is to look at a “blue print” of the layout. She also helped us come up with a few creative solutions to modify the floor plan and maximize key spaces like the Master Suite and Kitchen.

You’ve seen a lot of pictures so far, but a bird’s eye view gives you a much better sense of the flow of the house. Check out the floor plan as it is now:

Here’s our rough plan for modifications:

Okay, labeled on the floor plan above are our seven basic modifications to the floor plan. Here’s the logic behind each one:

1. Add a small powder room off the formal living room, just inside the office.
   The biggest reason for doing this is to balance the house a little better…it just makes sense to have a bathroom on the side of the house where most of our living and entertaining will happen! (This, of course, is something we consider a splurge, so it will be the first to be cut if our budget gets tight. So y’all don’t get too attached to this one yet!)
2. Remove the wall separating the kitchen from the family room.
   Bigger kitchen + creating one large living/entertaining space? Um, duh! This was a no-brainer.
3. Add a wall inside the butler’s pantry to create a laundry room.
   We are relocating the existing laundry room to make better use of the master bedroom/bathroom space. But don’t you worry, we are not totally doing away with that adorable butler’s pantry!
4. Close off doorway to create a foyer
   This teeny little change is responsible for BIG improvements! Not only does it create a welcoming little foyer instead of looking down a hallway of bedroom doors when you enter the house, but closing off this access point allows us to completely reconfigure the hallway and incorporate some of that space into our master bathroom and add a pretty substantial closet (ahem, for the lady of the house).
   
5. Reroute the hallway through the existing laundry space and bedroom three’s closet.
   Again, this allows us to add a large closet to the master, plus it helps shorten a long, awkward hallway with more doors than a freshman dormitory (that all currently hit one another if open at the same time). Believe me, this is a really good thing.
6. Close off access to the smaller closet in the master and open it up from bedroom three.
   While it goes against every bone in my body to remove a closet, this is essential because we are routing the new hallway right through the existing closet for bedroom three. Switching one of the two small master closets to bedroom three in order to get an extra large master closet? Call my broker; that’s a fair trade!
7. Close off direct access from bedroom two into hall bathroom.
   Again, this is a case of superfluous doors. We’re nixing this one so the only access will be from the hall, no doors will hit each other, and it frees up a little more space inside the bathroom itself… plus, no one wants to sit down on the throne and then think to themselves, “did I lock both of those doors?”

So, there ya go—a bird’s eye view of our little Nest!  😉