First Sketches!
House, Renovation, Toronto ·Last night Cindy and I met with our architecture/design “team” of Paul and Yoko. Paul had sent Yoko and one of his other employees, Mike, to do detailed measurements of the house as it currently sits. From those measurements and the survey, they came up with some suggestions for directions to go with the design, and a plan.
Paul had drawn up three ideas for the main floor, plus the layouts that we had discussed for the second floor and the attic. The great part of this is that we don’t have to do an addition to get all the parts of the house that we want; we can get the additional space from better use of the attic.
For the main floor, the most interesting idea was to move the kitchen from the back of the house to the front, right off the front door. This layout would allow us to use the full width of the house at the back for a living room, and also works better to hide some of the structural elements of the house, like the plumbing stack and the chimney through which the furnace vents. The downside is that we have to move some of the services, but that’s not a huge deal, as there is also a plumbing stack in the front hall closest that we can tap into. So far, this is the plan that I think we’re leaning towards.
The next step is to see how the new usage of the house works with respect to the zoning in our neighbourhood. By using the attic, we are adding to the square footage of the house, and that may push us over the zoning limit. So some exploration of the bylaws is required before we know what to do next.
All said, very exciting to see it take shape, even on paper!