1st Floor Interior Elevation - East View

Something new for this blog, interior elevations! This is an inside look at what we plan the first floor to look like. The top part is the west interior walls, the bottom is the east wall. This clearly shows the plan to make the west wall exposed brick from front to back. I havent really talked much about materials to this point as we have been focusing more on the form of the building, but this is now what we are getting to. Our plan is to have the entire west wall be built inside with reclaimed chicago common brick. We have a bit of this in our home, and we really like the look, and energy saving qualities of it. For the sake of visual continuity, the bathroom and butler's pantry have been omitted from the drawing. Moving from the back of the house to the front, you can see the fireplace design along with a close up of that design down below. Currently, our hope is to have the fireplace made of the same limestone that we are going to use for the front of the house, and we think it will be a nice contrast against the pinkish brick background. As we head to the dining room you can get a much better look at what the Sullivan arch is going to look like from the entrance of the room. I get giddy just looking at it, its going to be quite a fantastic room! Moving the front of the house and the library, we are going to continue the brick all the way through the turret to the entrance of the library. We are going to then put a set of bookshelves in front of that wall to make a nice relaxing background for the library.

The east side of the first floor is also represented with its main material - drywall. Most of this side will contain that and windows. Start from the left, or front, of the house, you can see a window in the entrance hall, and then the split of the stairs going up to the second floor and then further along the empty space that denotes the hallway going down. Next you come to the door for the pantry, and then the entrance to the kitchen. This is the first glimpse of the kitchen that we have, and we are already going to change it. We are keeping the layout with respect having the fridge on the left, range in the middle and the sink and dishwasher in the island, but we are going to choose to not put in the cabinets hanging on the wall above the east face of the wall. There will most likely be a set of cabinets on the wall shared with the pantry next to fridge, but that will be it for above the counter cabinets. Our thought process here is two fold: 1. We really feel like we are going to have more then enough cabinet space below the counter tops, and if you combine that with all of the space we will have in the pantry, we are talking about a lot of empty cabinets - 2. At this point we are pretty excited about the idea of putting smaller windows on each side of the range hood and then running a nice tile back splash all the way to the ceiling from the bottom of the range. Not only will this bring quite a bit more light to the back of the house, it will provide some very nice morning sun in the winter, as the sun rises on the southeast corner of this property thru most of the middle of the winter. More to come on this as we push forward on these specifics.