How To Renovate

EP59 Breaking the Floorplan: Rethinking the Way You Live in Your Space

• Tash South

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Today’s episode is a gentle but firm permission to break the floor plan! Stop letting outdated room labels or cookie-cutter layouts dictate how you live in your home. Estate agents may have labelled the rooms, but that doesn’t mean you have to live in them that way.

Maybe you need a yoga space. A music nook. A second office. Or just a calm, sunlit corner to drink your morning coffee and take a breath.

Renovating is not just about moving walls or chasing square footage. We want to create a better way of living and a better way to connect within our own homes. Simple connection points in a home mean so much. It really is so powerful when you take ownership of your space, and think about how you want to live and how your home can support that.

In this episode we’ll dive into how to challenge your existing floor plan, think in flexible, lifestyle-driven zones, and why your home should support the way you want to live — not fight against it.


Masterclass Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

Space Planning & Layout
https://www.southplacestudio.com/masterclasses/masterclass-space-planning-layout


How To Draw Easy Scaled Floor Plans
https://www.southplacestudio.com/masterclasses/masterclass-how-to-draw-easy-scaled-floor-plans


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Hi I'm your host, Tash South I'm an Interior Designer and Renovation Consultant.
Each episode of How To Renovate is short, but brimming with practical advice to help you manage your renovation project with confidence and success.

Grab some more renovation advice & free resources and become part of the South Place Studio Renovation Community at
https://www.southplacestudio.com/freebies

Everything I teach about renovation falls within my Five Pillar Process for A Successful Renovation, to learn more about the process, head to
https://www.southplacestudio.com/pillars


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Tash South:

Hello, hello, it's Tash here and welcome back everybody to the how to Renovate podcast. Today I want to talk to you about something that I think we've all felt at some point, and that is feeling that your home's layout just doesn't quite work for you and the way you live. And so today I want to talk about kind of breaking the floor plan and rethinking the way you live in your space, because really it's easy to just think that the rooms that the estate agent have labelled on the floor plans is how they should stay, but you know it doesn't have to be that way. You can break the floor plan and make it work for you. I know some people are really nervous about doing this because they worry about resale value. They worry that the layout that works for them might not work for the next owners of the home, and that is a valid worry. It really is. But I think if you think about it carefully and you plan it in a way where it can be flexible and serve you but still be flexible enough for future owners to use it, then I think it could work both ways. So I think you just have to really be clever about it, really really think about it and explore your home, explore your floor plans and try it and just experiment and see what might work better for you with the space you have, because, I mean, our lives are changing.

Tash South:

So many of us don't want a formal, separate dining room anymore. Maybe you need a space to run your business from home, maybe you do yoga, maybe you homeschool your kids, maybe your lifestyle doesn't fit around the mould of what an estate agent has labelled a floor plan as. So that's okay. Our homes are ours and we can make them work for us. In fact, we have to make them work for us because you know, life is tough out there, especially at the moment, and I truly believe that when you come back to your home, it needs to be easy, it needs to be functional, it needs to support you, it needs to revive you. It shouldn't be yet another frustrating thing that you have to deal with and be unhappy with. You should be able to come home, recharge and then go out there tomorrow and do it all again, and so I truly believe that you need to make your home work for you, and if that means you need to throw the traditional floor plan out the window, then really, really consider that.

Tash South:

So let's get into the episode and discuss a few points on this topic. Ok, so, moving on to number one, I want to talk to you about the power of experimenting with your floor plan. Now, if you've been listening for a while, you know that I am all about this. I talk about this a lot and actually when I'm designing homes whether it be for myself or for clients this is where I start, always with the floor plan. And I will sit with a floor plan for days and exhaust all the possible options of how I could adjust it, make it better, open up spaces, close up spaces, different places rooms can go, experimenting with the different flows of the rooms, experimenting with where the windows and the doors should be. So get your floor plan. Sometimes you can get that from your old estate agent's sales particulars. So get your hands on the floor plan and then just start drawing, start experimenting, take some walls out, add some doorways in, draw up some room layout. In fact, I've got a great masterclass on this. It's called Space Planning and Layout and you can find it over on the website at southplacestudio. com forward slash masterclasses. So do go and check that out, and there's actually another masterclass there teaching you how to draw scales drawing. So if you want to really get into it, that masterclass is there for you as well. I'll link to both of those in the show notes.

Tash South:

Okay, but back to the topic experimenting with your floor plan. So when you're starting with this, you have to think about your own life, really examine what you need. In fact, get your pen and paper out and start listing what you need from your home. Ask yourself questions Do you use every room equally? Do your needs fit the mould or the floor plan that your home currently is in? Probably not. But then how can you adjust it? What can you do to make it work better for you? And then also think about how you live in the space or how you want to live in the space. You might want a huge kitchen, dining space to host friends. Perhaps you love cooking and you want a proper chef's kitchen, or maybe you're not so keen on cooking and you just prefer a smaller kitchen. But you need some space for an artist studio or a music studio or meditation room or a walk-in wardrobe. So to really think about what you need from the space and what your family or those you live with need from the space and then work from that. You don't always have to let the current layout of the home dictate what's going to be there in future. Things can change, especially if you're doing a major renovation anyways. Then it's especially important to really think about how you want to use the space that you're going to be creating, because it can be really frustrating not doing this homework at the start and then getting to the moving stage of your home when your renovation is complete and then finding out that it's just not quite working the way you imagined.

Tash South:

So number two let's move on to number two is to think in zones, not rooms. So this is not to say that all the walls come down. That's not what I mean here. It's just, when you're thinking about using your space, think about how it can be best laid out and planned to bring that ease to your daily life, to bring that structure, to bring that framework so that you can move through your home and through your day easily, doing the things you need to do, finding the things you need to find, getting out the door on time. So think about those things and think about them in zones. So obviously, in a kitchen, you have your cooking and your eating zone. That's quite obvious.

Tash South:

But if you think about it in other terms as well so if you think about your hallway, as you're getting ready zone, so you're getting out the door zone, so you want to have everything in your hallway that could perhaps facilitate you leaving on time, making it easier to gather everything you need as you're leaving the house. Perhaps it's a built-in storage cabinet in a nook that was unused before, where you could add wardrobe storage. You could add shoe storage, you could add shoe storage. You could add a little basket for your socks, your keys, everything you need that you need to get out the door quickly without having to go up and down the stairs in your home to grab various bits and pieces that you need before you can leave the house. So think about that as getting ready to leave the house soon, and this could go as large or as small as you like, but if you think about that as getting ready to leave the house zone, and this could go as large or as small as you like, but if you think about it in advance, that's going to put you at an advantage when you're planning your home, obviously. So you could think about it in larger terms of this is my gym zone, this is my workout zone, and have everything you need in that zone. Or you could take it down minimally down to the point where you're thinking about your kid's craft zone. So perhaps you have one small area in the kitchen or one drawer in the kitchen that has everything your children need for their crafting. So this thinking in zones could really be as large or as small as you need it to be, but the sense of organization and calm that you will feel when you get these zones right and how that's going to form this framework and facilitate your ease of using the home, can really really be amazing. So don't neglect the thinking in zones, not rooms, train of thought. It is a really great way to think about things and this is actually how I plan a lot of homes for my clients as well.

Tash South:

And also, zones are not only about organization, they can also be a really great visual tool. So with visual zoning you can zone your areas with the lighting, with furniture placement. Even rugs or color can define a zone. So let's just take a really simple example. Let's say you have a round dining table and so quite obviously, that will be your dining zone, so you could have a round dining table, above it you could have a round pendant and below it you could have a round rug that the dining table and the chair sit on and that clearly defines the dining zone. Just really clear and simple example there. But you can use that in various ways. Perhaps you have just a corner of a room that's book shelving and you want to define that as your library zone. So just painting those bookshelves in the same colour perhaps as the corner or the section of the wall, comfy chair there with similar colouring or colour palette on it, that immediately then defines that as the kind of reading zone or the library zone. So you can see my thinking here and you can do that in so many areas of the home and it's also a really kind of calm and clear way to define these zones. And also just visually and mentally, I find as well, if your zones are clearly defined and your brain is taking them in as such, that just takes away from that visual clutter and the visual stress that we feel when our homes aren't quite as we want them to be.

Tash South:

Because, moving on to number three now, space is emotional, you know, and this is the part about design that I actually really love. Yes, it's amazing to make people's homes look great and change them so that they really love living there and appreciate living there. But for me, it's how that change influences how that person feels in their space, how it improves their lives, how it improves their productivity, their well-being and I've talked about this before but for me that's all about adding light and organisation, because that really helps with our mental health and our well-being. So it's all about how we feel and also where we linger and where we avoid. So really experimenting like this with your space and rethinking the way you live in your space, you can influence where you want to linger by thinking about it and thinking about how will I zone that? Where will that corner be that I want to linger? Is it that reading corner? Is it somewhere sitting on a window seat in the sunshine? And so think about the spaces now in your home where you want to avoid and then, when you're at floor plan stage, think about how you can change that, how you can rethink your layout so that you can make those places better or include them into another space to make that space more functional. So I just think that when we are reimagining our floor plans and when we are putting in that work at the start of the renovation.

Tash South:

It's not just about moving walls and making more space. Really, we are really wanting to create a better space life, a better way of living, a better way of feeling in our space and a better way to connect with other people as well. We want to create space to perhaps invite family over to gather with friends, to spend more time with our immediate family. Perhaps it's something as simple as right now not having a dining table or a space where you could sit together and eat. So just these simple connection points in a home mean so much. It's not just about square footage. It really is so powerful what this can do when you take ownership of your space and think about how you want to live and how your home can support that.

Tash South:

I read this really lovely thing a little while ago and it was about the flow and the design and how they work together and I just thought about it as kind of a dance, like choreography, between your spaces but not only the spaces, but how everyone moves around the home together seamlessly and effortlessly and creating a space where you can all kind of do the things you need to do together within the home, but not getting frustrated with one another or getting in each other's way. For me that's, that's choreography, that's a dance and that is, I think, so important for just bringing joy and happiness back into your home. So really just be creative. Just imagine a little bit, just dream a little bit, when you've got those floor plans in front of you, because you can get really creative with your space. And I just love it when my clients trust me to get creative with a space. I mean I've turned box room into dressing rooms.

Tash South:

I flipped floor plans, sometimes bringing the kitchen from the back of the house to the middle of the house. In fact, this house we live in now, our bedrooms are upstairs on the entrance level and our kitchen is downstairs on the garden level because we have a sloped plot. So you actually enter a ground floor level and then go down to a semi-basement which is our kitchen living space. So that is completely flipped. But what I thought about when we were designing this house was not really about the traditional floor plan of entering onto a floor where you've got the kitchen and the living room, because that would have been the obvious thing to do and then have the bedrooms upstairs and perhaps downstairs to that. But what was really important to me in this house was that we had space for a big kitchen, because we love cooking, we love eating together, we love entertaining and we wanted to be able to open the doors from the kitchen and go out into the garden, because the garden's not actually that big, so when the weather's good we kind of double that living space by opening the doors onto the garden. But if the kitchen had been up on the entrance level we would not have been able to do that. So our need for what we wanted from this property totally dictated the layout, not thinking about it in a traditional way.

Tash South:

And then I've done this for clients too. I had a client once that had a teenage daughter and the natural thing or the obvious thing people just always do without even thinking is to just if you're a family with children is, the parents take the larger bedroom and the children usually get the smaller bedrooms. But in this project we decided that you know, as parents we don't actually spend that much time in the bedrooms. We go there to sleep, but generally we're in the other living areas of the house, the other common areas. We're in the kitchen cooking, we're in the other living areas of the house the other common areas we're in the kitchen cooking, we're in the living room in the evenings watching tv or being with our families, or we're in our home offices working.

Tash South:

So during the day, there's that large space there that's not being efficiently used, whereas a child or a teenager would make a lot better use of that space. They've got lots more things. They've got loads of toys. They want somewhere to sit and have their friends over. So perhaps if they have the larger room, you can fit in a sofa or sofa bed or more storage for their books or toys, and so it makes sense if you think about it, doesn't it? It just makes sense to think about things in that way, rather than going the label on this bedroom says primary bedroom and the label on that bedroom says secondary bedroom. So just thinking about it, about how you actually live and how you use your space, will make your planning and your home a lot more efficient when you come to do this.

Tash South:

So that brings us to the end of the episode, everybody. So I hope that I've given you loads to think about here, but if there's really just one thing I want you to take away from today's episode. It's that your home doesn't have to follow the floor plan it came with. You can change it, especially if you're doing a major renovation and it's not working for you, then in fact I would argue that you must change it, because your home needs to work for you. You're allowed to question that, you're allowed to make bold decisions and you're allowed to put your lifestyle first. It's your home. So I hope that's helped you with thinking about how best to plan your space, and I will link to those masterclasses for you so you can go and check those out if you want to really get into it and start experimenting with just what you can do with your space and how you can make it work for you. But that's it for this episode, everybody. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for spending this time with me and I hope to see you in the next episode. I'll see you then. It's bye for now.

Tash South:

For more information on my five pillar process for successful renovation, you can go directly to southplacestudiocom forward slash pillars, where you'll find an introduction to the process, which covers each of the pillars and what they cover. We also have a number of other free renovation resources. Go now to southplacestudiocom forward slash freebies. I have created some amazing freebies for you there. There is one on the process, like we just said, there is one on planning permission, there is one on kitchen design, there is another one on lighting planning. Go and check those out. There's so much free information there to help you with your renovation.