House Plans

As you may or may not know, I am in the process of buying a house… and have been for the past six months. I found the perfect little circa 1900 rowhouse that was renovated in 2007 and put an offer in on it in December. It is a short sale, which means the original owner was short on money and didn’t want to foreclose.

It’s taken the bank months and months to accept the offer, and while they did in theory, we still haven’t gotten an official letter. Time is running out and so is my patience with the seller’s agent, but that’s a whole different story!

I finally got in to see the house last week and to take lots of measurements, although I’d like to have taken more! While I have a house full of furniture, and the new house is about 400 square feet larger than my current one and the layout is similar, it will be a challenge to fit everything in it.

Traditional Baltimore-style row houses are like New Orleans shotgun houses – you can shoot a bullet from the front door and it will exit out the back door. In the new house, the long wall is exposed brick. So that limits what I can hang on it. It also has windows, something unusual for an interior row house, so that limits where the furniture can go.

I’ve been fiddling around with some layouts so I can decide what furniture to keep and what to jettison. It’s been interesting to work on this. I think I will use the front room – above in red with the fireplace – as the living room. Since I don’t have formal dinners, and I rarely cook, I thought I would make the dining room into a library with a dining room table – I have a drop leaf table that works perfectly.The first bedroom and the sitting room are loft-style and I will use one as my workroom/atelier. I need to figure out whether my beloved steel work-table will fit, both stylistically and size-wise.

I found a great room-arrangement program on the Bassett Furniture site, and have been cutting and placing things in it and then transferring them to a Photoshop document that I can fiddle with. Some of the items, like the rugs, are just there for placement! 

To put everything into perspective, the house is 12 feet wide at its widest and nine feet wide at the back. It’s about 50 feet deep, and totals 1100 square feet. The house where I lived before I moved to Wales was 9.5 feet wide and 30 feet deep!

Any suggestions are more than welcome and all positive thoughts that the sale goes through before the end of June so I can collect my $8000 in tax savings are appreciated!