I am pleased to finally unveil...(drum roll, please)... the stair remodel. Our house has a dreadful "entry experience". First off, it's hard to tell from the driveway, let alone the street, where the front door is and then when you do walk into the house, the very first thing you
see is saw was a dark chasm of stairs headed straight for the basement. Terrible feng shui! I’ve come up with several brilliant plans to remedy the situation, all of which involved demolishing the better part of the house. M came up with a much more realistic idea of liberating the stairwell toward the downstairs family room. Here are the before and after photos
When we got everything torn up, it was clear we’d need to leave in that narrow section of wall at the bottom of the stairs, but unclear if we needed to keep the beam across the family room. So rather than risk the house’s structural integrity, we left the beam in and added a shelf across the length of it to match the width of the wall section. We plan to put a projector up there and get rid of the clunky old TV altogether soon!
Obvously we have some decorating to do now, but it's really so nice the way it connects the up and downstairs of the house. And the light moving between the floors makes everything so much less awkward.
Even small projects like this bring out what you are really made of. When I was working in design offices, the common conception was that designing a home or remodeling one, together as a couple, is one of the top 5 experienced that lead to divorce. Here are some of the things that we learned about ourselves from this project.
*We are good at demolition. It’s fun and full of instant gratification and you know when you are done.
*Then things slow down because I’m awful at settling on a final design solution. Even now, I sort of want to tweak things.
*M and I work well as a design team, mostly because he is supremely patient with fickle me.
*M is good at the construction and making things work, but those nitty gritty final touches are very tedious.
Stay tuned, we have another project to showcase soon, in the kids' room!
6 comments:
Great work! It looks fabulous. It definitely improves the feng shui! Mike and Kristen
oh my goodness do i love it! remodeling is so hard to do, i think because it is hard to envision the finished space, really. i am so glad that you two are good at it together! now for the other fun part: redecorating:)
I think the after photos prove you and Marc are a fantastic team! Good work. Looks lovely.
It looks incredible! I am super impressed!
Wow! It looks so good!
Looks great! And it is awesome that you guys work well together. My mom always says it is cheaper to hire a painter than to do it yourselves and then pay for the marriage therapy afterwords. :-)
I'm curious - do you guys agree on decorating, does Marc just let you do whatever you want, or do you have long drawn out negotiations about every little thing? I'll let you guess which category we fall into. :-)
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