My wife and I just bought our first home, a 3 Bed 1 & 1/2 bath! It isn't that large, 900sqft not including the tiny garage that can't even fit one of our cars in it. The thing is the bedrooms are small, two are 10'x11' and one is 8'x11'. The full bath is pretty small but functional, but the second bath is just a toilet and sink crammed into the laundry room with the water heater. It makes for an extremely cramped laundry room that we barely fit our washer and dryer into, and in our opinion isn't very functional at all. The "master" bedroom will only fit our king-size bed and a cedar chest, and only one nightstand next to the bed. We have to have our clothes in the smaller bedroom, admittedly the king size bed does not make it easy to fit much in a room.We are wanting to look into knocking the wall down between the two 10x11s and joining them, and putting a small but functional full bathroom in the new large bedroom. Our concern is if the home value will be significantly reduced by doing this, and we want to do it ourselves. How do we make sure this wall is not load bearing?Something we have thought of doing to combat the value reduction is to turn the small garage into a bedroom. It does have the electric furnace in it, but I am hoping we could build a furnace closet around it. I would hate to lose the storage space, but maybe this is something we could do before we sell in order to keep the value up. We are planning to stay in the house for the next 5-10 years, but we know we will eventually outgrow it. We want to increase the functionality of the house while retaining as much value as possible for that reason. I will try to mark up a simple floorplan if that would be of any help. Also as far as I am aware the small town we live in does not have any permits pertaining to this, but I will have to look into it. They have no building codes at all currently. via /r/DIY https://ift.tt/2Ezr6ej
