Floor Plan Metamorphosis- Exterior

It's amazing the design of the exterior of our house went from this....

Image found here

To this...

The changes resulted from the following...

• Neither of us loved the original plan's drawing. 
• It was a little too contemporary and bland for us.
• I'm still not "in love" with our exterior but it's the inside that counts, right?
• We reversed the plans to better fit our lot.
• We added an extra garage stall.
• I originally fought against this addition but Nate can definitely say "I told you so" on this one.  It's nice for him to have that once in awhile..it doesn't happen often.
• We added extra square footage in a couple of locations in the house.

Tomorrow we will end floor plan week with a look at the basement plans!

Next Iron Chef

I'm usually the sous chef...but tonight....totally the Iron Chef.

I made myself supper. For the 2nd time in 1 month.  And it was edible. Yeah, that's blogworthy.

I hate cooking.  It takes time. And patience.  And I'm messy.  But I did it.

Mmmm, chicken gravy and biscuits. Mmmm, comfort food. 
Keeps me all warm when it's 7 degrees out.

I love this recipe.  It's quick, easy, and you get to use a whisk.  I love whisks.

I don't remember where I found this...but trust me...it's good.

And obviously good for you....

Nate edited the recipe and I follow his directions. 
Cook the chicken.  Make the gravy while the biscuits are cooking.  Dump chicken into gravy and dump mixture over biscuits.  Eat.
We found that baking it all together made the biscuits mushier than we liked.

What's your favorite comfort food recipe?

Floor Plan Metamorphosis- First Floor

Metamorphosis is a funny word.

Floor Plan Week continues with the first floor.

How did we get from this...



Original plans found here


to this....

We reversed the plans to better fit our lot.

We added a mudroom. Our first house lacked any area to place your coats/shoes when walking in the door.  We stored our shoes in the pantry. That's sick.  We knew a mudroom was a must-have! Especially with our lovely Iowa winters. 

After much debate, we added an office. We had originally planned to use the dining space as an office but changed our minds because:

• Other homes in our price range have dining rooms and although we plan on living here forever, we didn't want to do something to hurt the resale of the home. 
• Adding square footage increases the building cost but also increases the value of a home.  We had to look very hard at our budget when making this decision.
• Offices are usually messy (at least ours is) and that would be the first thing you see when you walk in the door. 
• I fell in love with an office in a Parade Home. It had a double sided fireplace and it was perfect and cozy and I needed one just like it!  Enough said.

In the kitchen we added a few more cabinets and an island.  We had an island in our previous house that we loved. The island also provides additional seating for entertaining.

We added a pantry inside a support column to increase storage space.

Most everything else stayed the same!  That's why we chose this plan as our inspiration...and the circular staircase and 2 story living room had me drooling all over my keyboard. Seriously.  It was gross.

Tomorrow we will look at the changes on the 2nd floor.