Lemonade Out Of Lemons

It was now just after Labor Day and Pine Building had their framing crew in place to start putting up the walls.

We had agreed to some interior modifications based on the unexpected addition of about 700 square feet of potential storage in the crawl space.  Certainly it was not a finished basement, but there was now the opportunity for me to put into the Michigan basement all manner of equipment and old things that were originally planned for the back of the garage or the 2nd floor storage room.

We worked with Zack Ostroff, Pine Building's architect, to rework partition walls and room locations.  The utilities that were originally destined for a 1st floor utility room next to the street side entrance were going to the Michigan basement.  Then the heating system was relocated from a special attic enclosure to the same area  in the Michigan basement.

That eliminated the time and cost to build the special attic enclosure and run water and gas lines into it.  It also freed up the space that was supposed to be the utility room for other purposes... we would now have a walk-in pantry!  That saved a couple of thousand dollars for the wall of cabinets that we were going to use as a pantry and enlarged the dining area by 2 feet of width.

We did have to give some of the space back.  Our intention was to have the area under the stairs to the second floor exposed as part of the living room.  That would now be walled off with an entry door for the access to the Michigan basement.

Since we did not need as much second floor storage space, we eliminated the separate laundry room by moving the laundry location inside of the storage room (by using an adjacent closet area) and it still left us with significant upstairs storage.  That allowed us to enlarge the two bathrooms by splitting the space from the original laundry room.

Overall, we did make lemonade out of the expensive lemons.