Anybody else trying to figure out how we’re already a week into February? Last Monday we started demoing the front-entry/ entrance into the office/coat closet, and already, it’s so much easier to envision what we have planned. The entry was one of our 10 projects to tackle this year, and although we’ve been documenting a lot of this process in our Instagram stories, we haven’t shared much of what our plans are here on the blog. So let’s catch you up.

Before demo, this is what we were dealing with.

The smaller door is a coat closet that currently doesn’t get much use (thanks to the mudroom), and the large door under the archway is the entrance into our office where we work with our team (listing photos from previous owners showed they used this room as a den/home theater), complete with a diagonal entry door and niches. The whole thing was so awkward.

Should we rewind even further back? You might not remember, but the archways into the music room, and through the dining room weren’t even there when we bought the house. We actually built those archways, modeled after the office archway because of the way they tie in the modern cottage style we want, but they weren’t able to be as tall due to a needed support header. So we always knew we would be revisiting this area, but at the time, we thought we would just be taking out the niches and lowering the arch.

Over the last few months, the renovation escalated a little bit! Instead of disguising the coat closet door, we decided to nix access altogether from the front entry and allow access from the office space. And with that, we decided to get rid of the awkward slanted doorway altogether and square it off. If you look at the white tape lines above, that is where we will be framing the new walls, eliminating the current office entrance, as well as the 45° tangent wall. Also, say goodbye to the little inset shelf nooks.

Hopefully this diagram better illustrates the plan, because it looks confusing now.

This where we are one week in. Can you start to see it now? Are you panicking because some of our wood floor is pulled up? Not to worry. The new studs need to be screwed into the subfloor, so we had to pull some of them up in order to uncover the subfloor. When the new walls are in, new wood planks will be installed and this will all be seamless.

This is how the new closet area looks from inside the office. This week we have a plumber coming to move the piping, so rebuilding can continue. This will now be a storage space for the office where we can keep all of our camera equipment, extra decor, etc. It feels like a big project, but fortunately, because we’re doing it ourselves, it’s costing hardly anything except the cost of some drywall. And I really think the squared off entry into the office will look so much more seamless.