I honestly had no idea what the square footage was of our 1850s guest cottage on the property. My guess was around 2k, so I was super eager to find out how close I was. Gretchen did us a solid and took ALLL the measurements, and while it isn’t perfect and I wouldn’t hand it over to an engineer, these floor plans are good enough for us to work off of and help us understand what we are really working with.

As a reminder, we don’t plan on moving any walls (god willing), so the size of the rooms now is what they will be later. We’ll work within this floor plan, besides stealing space from somewhere on the first floor to add a bathroom (we have ideas where).

The Shared Kitchen/Living Room

The first room is weighing in at 427 square feet, which, in my opinion, is big enough for a small kitchen, kitchen table, and lounge area. I can do a lot with an 18×23 room, right? Here you can see it below:

Now, an architect might come in and re-lay it out and move windows, etc, but I really want to keep the plumbing on this side of the house (the upstairs toilet is above the kitchen) and while I know that moving and reframing a window isn’t crazy expensive, I also know that every thing you do causes you to have to do other things (i.e. if we reframe the window then we have to change the siding on the outside, think about where the supports are, etc). A good motto for a remodel is “EVERYthing is a thing”.

The only real project that I need help figuring out is where to put the bathroom on this floor. Currently, there isn’t one (only a weird toilet closet on the second floor), and it feels pretty important, especially if any older folks wanted to hang here for a bit (those stairs are quirky to say the least). So we are hoping to keep the plumbing all on that corner of the house and put the bathroom under the stairs – just a tiny toilet, wall-mount sink, and shower. But at 36″ wide, she’s pretty tight, so we might have to bump that wall out a bit.

There is still the question of the window that looks out the non-functioning chimney, which I feel like is where the TV would be if there were a TV in this room, but hell, by the time we are done, maybe TVs won’t be a thing and robots will be beaming it all into our brains as we stare at walls. WHO KNOWS (I’m kind of serious, like maybe we just use one of those portable TVs on wheels and leave the weird window).

The Old Prop Room

This room is super odd, but cute. It has a closet, a post, and an old chimney in the middle. See here:

Hmm. Now, of course, looking at it from this view, the room would be more functional if it were opened up, if that closet were gone, making it a big rectangle. Ugh. Now that I’ve seen it as a rectangle, it’s hard to unsee that. We aren’t sure what is holding what up, so messing with anything that might be support doesn’t make sense. But if we wanted to have a main floor bedroom, this would be a good one…

The chimney is one of the few things that I think we can say is safe to go (it’s not in good shape and totally unusable). The window is the other thing that, while quirky, does really affect what we can do on both walls (or not do).

Now that I’ve seen that this room could be a rectangle, I’m a little tempted to make it one in hopes of adding a lot of function to it. Not saying I will yet, but it is a bit tempting.

The “Canning” Room

As a reminder, this room is off the main room, built likely in the 1940s or 1950s, when people in rural America grew and canned a lot of their own food. It’s big and high and full of potential (and a lot of problems).

This is going to be a nice, square room, with super high ceilings. The canning cabinets will go (they sound way cuter than they are), and I’m not sure if the windows will even stay (the view of both is bad, and the windows are in terrible shape).

The “Garden Shed”

A nice, even 12×16 room – look at that! Remember that this is the room that Brian thinks we can lose, but as you can see below, it has so much “charm”.

It just needs a little help :) Maybe this is just a pretty sitting room? A library?

The Landing/Bathroom

Heading up the stairs (which are super narrow, weighing in at 36″), we get to the landing, and it opens up a bit with a huge window. The toilet and shower closet are both about 4′ deep and 3′ wide, which means that if we wanted to leave them there and put a proper bathroom in, we could.

Of course, I love the idea of the sink staying where it is, the bathrooms essentially remaining where they are (just new), but I’m unsure if once it’s fixed up, it will be totally weird to see a sink outside of the bathroom

So yeah, one move would be to connect the two “stalls” and make a normal person bathroom. The other would be to keep the toilet stall as-is and redo the shower stall with tile, OR nix the shower up here altogether if there is one downstairs and make this a closet. If a family were ever to live here full-time all of these decisions would be different, but as a guest cottage, I’m inclined to do what is easy/quirky/less expensive than having it be fully decked out for some imaginary guests. But I honestly haven’t thought about this for one second – like maybe we can connect them in a more clever way??

The Upstairs Room

In what was likely the family bedroom, we have some fun quirks.

She isn’t symmetrical, as you can see with the ceiling. Sure, we could probably demo out that closet (that has a ton of storage) on the right size to make them the same, but not sure why we’d do that. I LOVE this room and all its weirdnesses.

So What’s The Final Square Footage?

She weighs in at a little under 1600 square feet!! I definitely thought it was bigger, as it honestly feels bigger than that when you are inside it (it is empty after all). I suppose the fact that there isn’t a real bathroom doesn’t help, although we didn’t include the closets upstairs, which are pretty big. This is super helpful for me to see it like this, but I have to really control myself to not look at it and want to, say, move doorways that kinda open into other rooms or get rid of weirdnesses (like the prop room closet in the middle of the rectangle).

What’s Next?

Well, I’ve been trying to get multiple quotes on the foundation, but not having the best of luck. I really want to do my due diligence, but it’s definitely holding up the process. This week, we are headed to the Oregon Historical Society to learn more about the house and property. More on that soon :)

*Photos by Kaitlin Green