Lou Manfredini's Room Smarts How to Renovate, Reconfigure, and Decorate the Areas in Your Home that Matter Most

Chapter One A Plan to Live With Want to fix up your home? Begin with the basics, in the form of an overall scheme. My friends Shirley and Jason have the perfect house, but if you asked me to pinpoint what it is I love about it, it would be hard to describe. Is it a mansion? No. Is it furnished to look like some nineteenth-century museum? No. Does it have all the coolest gadgets and twenty-first-century styling you see in magazines? Hardly. What it does have is class and comfort. It's the sort of place I could stop by with my wife and our four kids and spend the afternoonwithout worrying about filing an insurance claim in the aftermath. Yet it's extremely beautiful, in that casual sort of way that makes you feel at home. The house is well built, which is evident to me, but its gracefulness is obvious to anyone who sets foot inside. There's a logical floor plan, beginning right at the entryway. The kids are able to run upstairs to their rooms, or downstairs to the play area. The living room is off the entryway, and connects to the kitchen in the rear. The dining room is also off the entryway, and connects to the kitchen from the other side. In addition, a short hallway leads directly to the kitchen, so you can carry groceries straight to it without tripping over the dinner guests in the dining room, or Aunt Susie holding court in the living room. A floor plan like this works beautifully because there are no "dead ends" to get stuck in. The house feels roomier and more private, because it allows people to choose their own routes to get from one place to another. Beyond this, there's a unity to how the house looks. It's a grand brick Georgian on the outside, but this alone does not guarantee grandeur on the inside. After all, I have been in more than a few of these that have a layout that has been chopped and diced into so many separate little rooms it looks as though it's been through the Cuisinart. We often wonder where to put our money in a renovation in order to come up with a better home. I always argue in favor of beginning with the major systems such as the plumbing and electric, as well as the bathrooms and kitchen. This does leave the rest of the house when all that is finished, however. Fortunately, the work here can usually be accomplished for a fraction of the cost of these other areas. Beyond paint, an interior can sometimes be transformed just by the addition of a passageway from one room to another, or from a careful refinishing and restoration of the floors, walls, and woodwork. In other cases, the solution lies in a full-scale addition, which has the power to transform a house to an even larger degree. This is the costliest way to go, to be sure, and it also requires an understanding of the home's basic layout. Otherwise, the addition risks becoming one more room added to the chaos. To help you change the way your home works for you, let's focus on how to design an overall renovation plan, as well as to develop an effective strategy for working with the contractors who will help bring it to reality. Who Lives in These Rooms? I worked on a house some years ago in a tony area of Chicago, which to me epitomized everything that's wrong with many of the homes we live in. While I was remodeling the basement into a children's playroom, I had to walk right by the living room, and couldn't help noticing it in all its pristine glory. It had beautiful white carpeting, so plush that walking on it would feel like wading through whipped cream. Amazingly, in a house with three children under five, there was not a single footprint on the carpeting. I'm sure even the cleaning people vacuumed their way out of the place, just to preserve that showroom look. I commented on how gorgeous the room looked, and the homeowner aManfredini, Lou is the author of 'Lou Manfredini's Room Smarts How to Renovate, Reconfigure, and Decorate the Areas in Your Home that Matter Most', published 2004 under ISBN 9780345467225 and ISBN 0345467221.