Gettin’ Down ‘n Dusty

48 hours and six closets ago we started a project.   Not really a project, it’s more of a  “what the hell are we doing?” complete gut-job renovation.  When you say the words “what the hell are we doing” out loud in the middle of a project you know you are fully committed to what you just started!  When we bought the house  in August (found here) we knew we wanted to ‘rearrange” the master bedroom/bath to make it more functional for us.  Since it’s January, it’s cold out, and the boat’s in storage, there is no better time to start swinging a hammer.  The layout of our bedroom looked like this (yes, that’s past tense):

Now it looks a little like this:

Yes, that’s plaster, not drywall….and I won’t tell you how heavy it is. 48 hours ago we had an obnoxious number of closets in fairly close proximity.  We decided to remove all closets to make way for one very large, custom built, walk-in closet…like we did at our first home (found here).  This map marks all the walls on their way out:

Yeah, that’s a lot.  My reaction as well.  It didn’t seem over-whelming until we started swinging hammers.  In some weird universe I thought all the demo would be complete in one weekend….not so much.  It’s definitely going to take us one more week (working after our real jobs), minimum.  On the plus side, we have a plan!  We hired architect Aric Margolis  to design the space.  He provided us with this design:

It was a good plan but we ended up altering it slightly.  We wanted a larger closet and felt like we could utilize the wasted space in the  hallway and closets better.  This is our end goal for the master suite:

Continuing to swing the hammers is whats on this weeks list.  Most of the walls are gone.  The two walls left to be demo’d: the load bearing brick wall (was once a sunroom) and the long wall in the bath that will become the shower.   I am willing to bet my muscles will remind me tomorrow of all the hard work we put in this weekend!  Until then, wish us luck!!!