The Cottage - Interior Pics, Before/After

The Cottage project followed The Fire House.  As I've written plenty of times before, I moved every door and window on this house as well as all the interior walls except one that was original to the first small building.  I didn't set off to change everything so drastically, I simply just got carried away.  During demo I kept going and going as I played around with various floor plans, and before I knew it, the place was gutted.  I hadn't completely gutted The Fire House, so with this little house wide open, I felt free to radically change things and really go nuts.  I would ultimately add on front and back porches outside the two relocated exterior doors.  Other than these little add-ons, the core footprint of the house on the small lot was about the only thing that didn't change. 


The Future Foyer - Before

The shell of The Cottage was like a blank slate in many ways with my biggest challenge being the 6' 4" ceilings on the first floor.  Before I was set on a new layout, some wise and thoughtful person was nice enough to tell me that these low ceilings would negatively impact my appraisal when I was finished.  This is because when an appraiser is doing their math, any space with a ceiling height lower than seven feet gets classified as storage space and calculates out significantly cheaper.  Yikes!  For me, on this house, that was like three hundred square feet (over half the first floor), so I needed a solution. 

The Foyer - After
This is the same view as the picture above with the couch. 

In order to make the house more valuable, I tore out the porch and roof over the front of the house and that allowed me to create an interior balcony over the new foyer.  This also created some valuable extra storage space in the form of two deep closets on the second floor.  To deal with the low ceilings on the first floor, I demoed the section where the new dining area and den would be built, placed concrete, and installed heart of pine flooring that I had salvaged from the interior walls.  Then, I started putting everything back together on the rest of the inside. (See Floor Plans, Before/After) 

The second floor had 7' ceilings, but I reframed those to get up to eight feet.  When I was finished, the upper floor contained two bedrooms, a half bath, four closets, and a balcony overlooking the foyer below.


The Old Stairs where the future Dining Area would be - Before

The Old Stairs are gone. Same view as above - After. 

View from 2nd Floor looking down into Foyer.

New Kitchen - Like The TV House, I moved
it from the back of the house to the front.