Context

My friend Scott asked for context. So for those of you who have been to my house and can't picture exactly what I'm doing, or for those of you who've never been to my house, here's a little description.

My house is two levels with a split-foyer entrance. Upstairs is the living room, dining room and kitchen. Also upstairs there are two bedrooms and a full bath. The large one, in the back of the house, was intended as the master bedroom. The bathroom has a door leading into a hallway but also has a pocket door directly into the larger bedroom. The smaller bedroom doesn't really function well as a bedroom: it's very small, and it has French doors with glass, so there's no privacy.

The downstairs as-built was designed with the potential to serve as a mother-in-law apartment. It has a separate back door entrance into a large room that has a small kitchen area in the corner, and it has a small bedroom and a 3/4 bath. In the first post, you can see the "before" photos and the floorplan, with the existing walls as dotted lines. Coming from the front door and going downstairs, you enter a narrow hallway. The garage is on the right, and the closets on the left contain the furnace, hot-water heater, and laundry. In the floorplan, only the very end of this hallway is shown.

So that should provide context for what's getting remodeled. It's pretty much the entire downstairs area.

When I first bought the house in 1999, I had a roommate, and his bedroom was the small downstairs bedroom. We used the large room at the back as our TV room/family room. After he left, I had a few other roommates, but eventually I decided I didn't want or need a roommate, so I used the downstairs bedroom as my guestroom.

After I had my deck built in 2003, including having a sliding glass door leading from the upstairs master bedroom out onto the deck, I decided to move my bedroom downstairs into the large room, using the small bedroom as closet space and a dressing room. I made the upstairs master bedroom into a TV room/guest room, moved my piano into the small upstairs bedroom, and put my office downstairs, essentially in my bedroom.

After the remodel, I'll still have my office downstairs, but it'll be in the back corner of the bedroom, and I'll put some kind of screen between it and the bedroom area to help keep them feeling separate.

OK, I hope that provides the necessary context for Scott and anyone else who was confused.