Your 10-year-old wants to work on model airplanes, your teenager wants to watch TV, you want a quite place to relax –and everyone wants to be in the same room. How can a family room handle all the demands made on it?
Defined zones keep everyone together but out of each others way when you congregate in the family room. The four rooms shown here illustrate zone-planning. Each has a unified appearance but contains much more than a main seating area. Continue Reading…
Laughing, talking, playing, or just lounging –the family room is the place where home life grows. By nature it’s a multipurpose area: somewhere for the kids to dumps out all their blocks and built a city, a place to read quietly, watch TV, play cards and board games, show slides, flip trough the family album and laugh at how funny we use to look. The family room can also be called on to double as an entertaining center, eating area, sewing room, guest room, study. Continue Reading…
Turning a framed porch into an extra room may be a relative simple matter of replacing screens with windows. Turn a brick patio into living space, on the other hand, maybe as much work as adding an entire new room. The less structure present in the porch or patio, the more challenging your remodeling project will be.
Even of the porch has an adequate foundation, you still may have to deal with building up the floor, installing insulation, supplying ventilation, plus Continue Reading…
You frequently read about removing a wall to open up a room –and it sounds so simple! Sometimes it is, but you can’t wave a magic wand and make a wall disappear. Here are some questions and problems you must deal with before you tear down a wall.
Is the wall load bearing? That is, does it carry part of the weight of the house? All exterior walls –and usually interior walls- that run per-ventricular to the ceiling and floor joist are load bearing. Removing a load-bearing wall is not Continue Reading…
