Digging in to our home remodel

After four plus years of living in our little house in Rainier Beach, we've finally dug in to our long-planned remodel.  Although there have been downsides to living in our fixer as-is, we've had plenty of time to figure out what we like about the place and what we'd like to change. 

Family portrait on our first day as home owners back in 2008

More recent photo of our place

The scope we have planned includes a complete gutting of the basement, where we plan to add a bedroom, bathroom and storage area.

From the basement, we plan to move to the main floor, where we'll redo our 1970's kitchen, and knock out a wall to create an adjascent dining room.  We'll add a half-bath to the main floor, move the living room, and add lots of windows to the east wall to take advantage of our site's lovely morning sunshine.

If we have any left over money and will, we will then move upstairs, where we plan to gut everything and add a dormer, so we can actually see the lake and the mountains (at the moment, the best view in the house is from the upstairs bathroom, so we'd like to change that as well).

Finally, we'd like to re-do the front porch. It was not properly constructed, so it leaks water when it rains, and it is about 12" lower than the front door.  The concrete is crumbling and the forms holding it up have fallen out of place, so it badly needs replacing.  I would love to restore it to an open, covered porch; which, it turns out, was the way it originally looked (here's a great photo of the place in 1936, five years after it was constructed.    

We have spent years discussing our remodel project, and it's beyond exciting to finally get going.