October 20, 2014

Back To The Drawing Board -er- Books!

crayolaj74 Big Creek Farmhouse Remodel, My Artwork Included home remodeling, Nostalgia, Old country home, pencil drawings 12 Comments

Madre has been moved into her little “guest cottage” for about a three months now, and the old house is just as empty as empty can be. We’ve stripped out all the carpet, and it’s been so nostalgic for me to walk around on those old, bare wood floors. I love being able to see the reason why that certain stair always creaks. I’ve stared, fascinated, at things we have found laying around or even tucked into walls, like tiny hair barrettes from my youth.

Planning for a new home is difficult. I’ve never really had to plan before, because I never had this much time to think about it. What’s making it worse is that I know the house we are moving to like the back of my hand, having grown up in it. I want to be able to visualize it the way I want it to look, and I think I may have found a solution.

I took three semesters of engineering classes in college. I got my degree in business, which tells you that the engineering path did not hold my attention. Becoming an engineer was not really my dream, as you know, because I’ve been living my dream for the past 18 years behind the salon chair. My first semester, I earned a G.P.A. of 1.57. Obviously, I repeated a lot of classes second semester. I took Chemistry II in the summer to try and catch up, and toughed out the engineering courses for one more semester before throwing in the towel and changing my major.

I didn’t learn much about engineering, if you can imagine. I know there are tons of software programs out there that will aid in the planning of home building and remodeling, but this type of software usually makes me want to throw my computer out the window. I figure, Hey, I can draw! Maybe not to scale, and maybe not straight lines, but I can get my point across with pencil and paper.

This is what I have come up with so far. I hope my crazy, lopsided drawings will be enough to convey my wishes to our contractor. The good thing is, the house is crazy and lopsided anyway, so my drawings should work just fine!

We’ll have two tiny bathrooms when we move.  The one depicted in the above drawings currently has a tub/shower unit that came out of a single-wide mobile home.  That’s all that would fit in the tiny space.  Luckily, there’s a closet right beside this bathroom, which is large enough that we can steal a foot or so of space from it  to put in a larger tile shower.  I’d kind of like something like my drawing, but the more I look at that bathroom the more I realize how tiny it really is.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

We won’t need to do a whole lot to these two rooms.  The floors need shoring up, but this drawing was just a way to see how I wanted to place some of my furniture.  I know it only looks like one room, but the dining room is behind that glorious stone fireplace (that now looks freakishly huge in this drawing).

This drawing of the kitchen probably won’t make sense to you.  I’m sure my drawing doesn’t suck so bad that you won’t recognize the stove.  The cabinet to the right > of the stove is there, and not going anywhere.  It’s actually the sink, and the reason it’s so much taller than the stove in this drawing is because, it actually is.  Papa built this and all the other cabinets in the kitchen specifically for Madre, because at 6’2″ it’s not fun to wash dishes at a traditional-height sink.  The two cabinets to the left < are cabinets I drew to get ideas of what I’ll want.  At the moment, there are no cabinets there at all, because Madre took them to her little house.

This is my idea of what needs to be done to the sunroom.  I figured if I have some built-in shelving on either end of the room, it won’t take as many windows to fill up the space.

I know these drawings don’t mean much to anyone but me, but I enjoyed drawing it all, and getting to see it how I want it to look.