Hi friends! Welcome back to our ranch house tours!
Yesterday I’ve shown you our yard and the exterior of the house. Today, I’d like to walk you through the main floor of our ranch:
As you can see, the main floor consists of a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms. It is connected to the garage with a door in the kitchen (you can see the floor plan here).
1. The living room
The “1” in the above floor plan is our living room. Since move-in, we have torn off the dirty carpet, brought a dining table, a pair of dining chairs, and added record storage. Slav set up a tech center at the corner for his desktop server and routers and stuff, and I put up some window curtains for privacy.
The green rug is an older IKEA one we brought from North Carolina. It is really cheap – I think it is about $30 now – and easy to replace, but we decided to bring it with us, for our pups’ sake. This rug used to be next to the floor-to-ceiling windows in our NC apartment so our dogs spent lots of time laying and playing on it. It was the zone for patting, grooming, tugging, and eating tons of delicious treats. The smell of this rug must encode so many good memories and so many people they cared about. It smells like home. During the packing and unpacking (we moved twice in three months), this rug became the sanctuary in this big rocking world for our pups. You can always find them chilling on it.
We have not gotten a sofa yet – I want to do something fun with the sofa but I feel that something too modern is not gonna speak to the house well – so we wait. At the mean time, we have gotten two recliners and a nice sideboard! Cannot pass these beautiful trims.
Our immediate plan for the living room is to finish the floors. Down the road, we would like to move the computer stuff into the garage (where our internet cable came in the house), and build some book storage against the garage wall. We have so many books that 1/3 of the Slav’s office is filled with them now. So we need to spread them out a bit.
2. The kitchen
Oh, the kitchen. Among the greasy cabinet, the moldy grout, the old appliances, and the dirty flooring, I do not know which part of the kitchen we hate the most! We cleaned up quite a bit in here to get it up and running, but it is about all I can say with this place.
We have already took our hammer here and removed some cabinets (which did not improve the look at all), and we started to get really curious what is behind the soffits. But hold on! We do not have the budget to do anything to it (except demo, I guess), so we might have to come up with some temporary beautification here.
3. Our bedroom
Our bedroom is the first room we set up after moving in. Having a clean and comfortable place to sleep really made renovation easier. We got a really comfortable mattress from Costco a year ago and have been enjoying it a lot. And our new storage bed is steady as a rock. We actually rotated our bed 90 degrees so we can get more cool air from our floor vent, but the room is still like the day we set it up – simple and calming.
As you can see, we have a really small closet here. We have fair amount of clothing living in colder climate, so this small closet only fits our three-season clothes. All of winter coats, snow gear, and Slav’s formal shirts are kept in the closet in the office, which is directly next to the bedroom closet. The plan is to reverse that closet to the bedroom to make a big closet, with the help of some kind of storage system like the PAX.
4. Slav’s office
The room we have the clearest vision for, is Slav’s office. I knew what I was gonna do to this room as soon as I saw it for the first time. It is 14′ by 10′, a pretty good size, and we will open it to the living room with a pair of french doors – something like this.
We also want to build library shelves here for all the National Geographic we brought from a recent estate sale. Since we plan to close off the closet to the bedroom, the old closet wall becomes the perfect candidate for displaying these beautiful books:
— The closet currently houses all of Slav’s formal clothing, our winter coats, and travel gears. We will reverse it to facing the bedroom to make space for a whole wall of library bookshelves here —
It will be a fun project to remodel this room for sure. Hopefully we can get to it this winter. Opening it up to the living room will open up our living space so much – like you have another living room on the left side when you walk into the door! But we will still be able to close it off with french doors/pocket doors if Slav needs some privacy.
5. The main floor bathroom
Same as the kitchen, our main floor bath definitely can use some re-caulk. I am gonna save you from the pictures of old aluminum windows and moldy silicone for now. Our plan for it is to refresh the caulk and sealant in the bath, and potentially add more storage. Down the road, it will be nice to completely renovate this room, including getting rid of the bathtub (no one takes bath in our family), stealing some space from the hallway to fit a two sinks, and upgrading the toilet.
Here you have it, our main floor living space. It is merely 850 sqft but perfect for two of us. We think that it will be really lovely once we open the office to the living room, and renovate the kitchen and the bathroom. One goal we have for the main floor is to keep it simple and minimal. To be honest, we were a bit surprised that how well we fit in this small space – we have not even used the entire basement yet!
Leave a comment