Demo Stage

I have had so many thoughts about how I wanted the layout of the house to be and was constantly changing my "perfect floor plan" when new bits of information came in.  The first real solid decision I made was where to put the kitchen.

That decision was made after I did a full day of research at the City of Phoenix permit and zoning building.  After lots of questions and an understandably frustrated city zoning employee there was really only one place I could place a two car carport and nowhere I could place a garage unless I wanted to build a free standing 1 car garage (which is expensive and I really want two car parking).

I found out the carport must get placed on the North side of the house so the kitchen needs to be placed close to the carport.  So most of my favorite floor plan ideas needed to be scrapped.  But after talking it through with some friends and family I came up with a pretty great floor plan and went ahead with the demoing of the old tile and walls.

Below are some before and after pictures.

Before the demo pictures (taken before I owned it while tenants are living in it.):

During and After Demo:

First Thoughts and Layout

I took about 8 months until I officially purchased the duplex.  This duplex was in preatty great shape and really setup preatty well as far as duplex's go.  One side was a two bedroom, one bathroom unit. The other side was a three bedroom, one bathroom.

I've never done anything like this before and I'm not all that handy and don't have lots of money to burn.  Creativity and patience are is what I'm banking on.  The fact that this was a duplex made me hopefully that many of the pieces will work together.

The first thing I did was create a rough floorplan of the duplex.  Which looks like this.

The room names without a box are unit A.  The boxed names are Unit B's rooms.

The Story

This whole thing happened in a pretty strange way.  I found a duplex that I really liked in a great neighborhood.  I planned on buying the duplex as an investment and with a whole lot of bumps and turns it seemed like it was finally going to happen.  Then the dreaded appraisal came, which always seems to stimey me every time,  It turns out that this perfectly to code duplex was never zoned to be a duplex (even though in all the tax records it was a duplex).

So it couldn't be purchase or legally used as a duplex.  After a temper tantrum and a few days to think about it I came back and said I still wanted to purchase the house and I will convert it to my new home.

And so the steps I took to renovate a duplex into a single family home will be written in this blog.  Wish me luck!