The Jigsaw Puzzle, continued.

I’ve returned with the scoop on how we are expanding a compact home with an equally compact addition. This garage addition includes two small bedrooms, a full bath, a laundry area and multiple storage closets. 

Original Garage & Entry

Expanded Plan

First, we took over the outdoor covered entry to create a foyer.  The bottom of the stair opens up to the new hall to bring the spaces together in a seamless way.  A key to designing for space efficiency is not to scrimp on the circulation areas.  This applies to furniture arrangement as much as to permanent fixtures. While it’s tempting to steal an inch or two, for a larger room or an additional piece of furniture, the fact of the matter is that we tend to experience constraint more acutely when we’re trying to get from one place to another.  Clutter comes in all forms.  Generally, if you have less than 3 feet to move, it needs to go. 

Child rearing does not conform to cut throat minimalism and it shouldn’t.  Play is a main component of any kid’s home.  Here, we’ve added a swinging bookcase that leads to a hidden nook under the stair, named for a certain wizard.  In the future, it will probably become suitcase storage, but for now it’s just big fun.

The bedroom sizes are more suitable for kids’ rooms.  We’ve made an effort to add interest to both rooms with floor-to-ceiling built-in cabinetry and a custom bunk bed.  In reality, no one can remember the size of his or her childhood room with any accuracy.  It always seems large when it’s all yours.  What we do remember are the cool nooks and crannies, so a focus is put on creating that level of specialness here.  The beauty of this layout is that the closet core can be removed when the kids go to college, leaving a spacious lower master suite that can be opened up to the garden.

Foundation walls should always be concealed when taking over garage space for living.  The addition needs to feel like it has always been there.  Furring out the walls takes up valuable space, but it helps to achieve a sense of permanence and provides extra wall depth for built-in storage, deep window openings and extra insulation.

Next: the biggest tiny bathroom I’ve ever designed.  It includes a short, deep soaking tub and a wall-mounted toilet to maximize the 4 x 6 foot space.   Wall-mounted toilets are now readily available for residential use in the US.  I am as excited as one can possibly be about toilet availability!  It’s the perfect solution for tiny bathrooms or for people, like myself, who like the idea of running a mop under a toilet instead of dealing with the knobby porcelain base.  A vanity is recessed under the stair, which brings about an angled head height situation.  Though not ideal, we chose to make this sacrifice to make the bathroom work.  It will feel quite spacious, especially for a secondary bathroom.  Stone tile at the walls will give it a crisp look, while deep recesses provide the opportunity to stash away bathroom clutter. 

For now, here’s a picture of that dreamy wall-mounted toilet tank!

Thinking Inside, Outside and All Around the Box

For reasons I will get to shortly, cabinetry is on my mind today. It’s a key element to most residential projects and one that can be difficult to navigate.  Cabinetry is incredibly simple in its components, but executing a design properly can be more complex than people tend to realize.  We are really just talking about boxes, here.  If you’ve ever put together a piece of IKEA cabinetry, you know this first hand.  There are strong boxes and weak boxes.  I could ramble on about the difference between the two, but that’s really a separate topic from the issue at hand.  Suffice to say, I encourage my clients to go with plywood boxes with durable, high quality joints.

Now for the issue that has brought me to my keyboard today, the choice between custom and semi-custom cabinetry.  Let’s look at a comparison of two kitchens that I designed last year.  Project A decided to go with a local custom cabinetry shop and Project B through a cabinetry showroom in San Francisco that sells semi-custom cabinetry, shipped from a factory in Texas.  

Both involved a mix of two finishes. Project A is a modern combination of walnut plywood and pearl laminate slab faces.  Project B is a shaker style mix of cherry and painted cabinetry.  Both projects came out beautifully, but the roads to this end could not have been more different.

Project A followed a production process with which I am very familiar.   I was in contact with the cabinetmaker regularly.  He redrew my design, taking into consideration clearances that he would need for installation.  We checked and rechecked conditions and details before the cabinets were made.  They took a little longer to build than expected, but even that is not unusual for a project of this type.

I had never worked with a cabinet showroom before Project B.  This one provided a reasonable price and assured me that they would handle all cabinet-related issues.  I am usually responsible for checking the shop drawings that I mentioned above.  In this case, the showroom representative took over that responsibility.  In theory, the arrangement would require less of my time and I could pass that savings on to my client.  In reality, every shipment that we received from this company was faulty and had to be corrected by a local carpenter.  Even the shipments sent to correct previous shipments were wrong.  The company did take responsibility for all of its mistakes, but the cabinets were just finished today, nearly SIX MONTHS later, and I spent loads of time trying to correct their mistakes in the least wasteful way possible.  

In the end, a local cabinet source makes the most sense on so many levels.  Aside from quality control and accountability, there are a lot of economic and environmental benefits to supporting our local cabinetmakers. (For anyone interested, the cabinets in Project A were made by Kirby Cabinetry in Berkeley, California.)  

My Jigsaw Puzzle of a Project

L-R: Existing front entry, Excavated slab, New slab, Framing begins

So, here we go!  In the spirit of quick and spontaneous beginnings, I bring you the story of a little home near Twin Peaks in San Francisco.  When I say little, I mean barely over 900 square feet, and when I say home, I mean an abode that supports a family of four…and a dog.  They love their house.  They want to stay.  The six year-old is growing everyday and the teenager needs his own space.  

It goes without saying that a family living in cozy quarters might know a thing or two about space efficiency and making every square foot count.  They decided to take this approach downstairs to their garage.  Their current entry delivers them directly upstairs, with little room to even turn around. What if they could build out some rooms at the garage level, minimize the parking area and add another 50% of space to their home?    

There are several benefits to taking over garage space for an addition.  In this case, it flows perfectly with their layout because they already have an interior stair.  They have the option of doing a small affordable project right away and putting off a future project that would really open the rear wall to the garden. This approach avoids building a new foundation for an exterior addition, as well as the increasingly expensive and time-consuming process of getting a project through the San Francisco Planning Department.  The building permit for an addition that occurs within the existing home envelope is issued over the counter.  I was able to design the addition and pull a permit within three weeks of our initial meeting.

Rule number one with remodeling: There are always glitches.  Expect them, plan for them (to whatever extent possible.)  In this case, the first major glitch was a waffley garage slab.  We had planned to install a hardwood floor over it, on sleepers to compensate for the undulating concrete slab, but the resulting ceiling height of the new rooms would be less than the legal and comfortable height limit.  The decision was to remove the existing concrete slab and pour a new, lower and level slab that could work as the finished floor.  Ideally, radiant heat would be installed into this new slab, but these clients were already looking forward to a new 95% efficiency forced air furnace. 

Next glitch:  WATER. Lots and lots of water, draining from the top of Twin Peaks below their slab and out to the street.  A simple drainage system needed to be installed along the rear of the building while the slab was torn up.  This was all for the best, considering the poor quality of the existing sewage pipes below the slab.   They were swapped out and a future crisis avoided. 

The new addition includes two small bedrooms, an incredibly efficient full bath and a laundry closet.  Stay tuned to learn how we made it all work!

Getting Started.

Hi there, and welcome to hiccups!  I direct that welcome as much to myself as I do to you, since this is my very first entry, of what I hope will become a thick virtual diary of my architectural practice.  I’ve decided to start hiccups in order to document the processes, quirks and mishaps that occur during remodeling projects.  The highlighted jobs will be primarily residential remodels, since those are keeping me busy these days.  

 

I find myself struggling to ‘make a mental note’ of issues that come up during the design and construction of these projects, but the fact of the matter is that a blog’s memory can beat the heck out of mine any day of the week.  I'm turning to this blog to help me learn from my own experiences, and if it can help some others along the way, well that would be the icing on the cake.