If you have a servant’s staircase, I assume this is an older home. Older homes weren’t intended to be wide open; will making this change destroy the character of the home? And will cost $$$$.

What’s the second picture - the current kitchen? IMO the biggest drawback to functionality in that picture is the island.

Your new family room will be nowhere as big as the old one, especially if you have seating at your island. Ok with just having a little conversational area there and making the living room your main hang?

The way you have positioned the addition does not lend well to mating it to an existing house. You will have some massive beams and columns in the space.

You have many threads about various little space remodels here and there in the house - it might be best to hire an architect and conceive everything at once, design it right from the beginning, not piecemeal.

@littlebug zone 5 Missouri it's a debate of keeping the charm vs adding functionality to today living. There is no way of expanding the house without removing that wall unfortunately. Bottom layout is existing

Verify that you can put code compliant stairs to the basement underneath your current staircase. Many old staircases are not wide enough and may have a tread width and riser height that is taller and narrower than current codes allow, both things which amount to a set of stairs that takes up more room. You may not be able to Fit code compliant stairs to the basement underneath an upper set of stairs that is not compliant or barely compliant and it could involve changing the upper staircase as well.

@acm the family room can be expanded to the left wall or close to it. It's all a tentative sketch. The existing living room is not really great when you can't see what kids are doing from the kitchen, plus furniture is very challenging there for tv watching. @3onthetree we have an architect for this, but we don't need one for a basement playroom... we have an ongoing list of projects and we're trying to string a sequence for them taking into consideration the weather (no exterior projects for now), urgency (our basement had to be ripped out from Ida so we have toys and furniture all over the house that used to be there) and lifestyle (addition). The top was a quick sketch by the architect, not a final rendering

You may have noncompliant stairs that would have to be replaced with compliant stairs and that's gonna eat some real estate.

One option that might work for Openness, if moving the basement stairs becomes too costly or complicated would be to remove the maid's stairs and design the kitchen layout to enclose the basement stairs essentially at railing height and below. It would open the airspace at least.

@palimpsest I just asked my architect that question, thank you

I know we were talking about this in another thread- a few images of what my movement of servant stairs allowed us to do with our floorplans:

The first image is our original blueprint, second is what we're in the process of building out now. The only change to our footprint is a 3'x3' addition to the front of the old 'covered porch' to help square off the new kitchen between the range and the sink.

The service staircase in our house was removed by the previous owners. Thank god I didn't have the weight of that guilt on my shoulders. I would have loved them. I love historic homes. And yet, without them, we were able to have more cabinets in our kitchen and add a powder room to the first floor.

What have other homes in your neighborhood done? I presume you live in an area with similar houses. Also, how soon do you anticipate moving and what would YOU enjoy in this home were resale not a factor?

Obviously, the ramifications of moving stairs flow through to the other floors. The update wasn't just great for us in terms of being able to make our kitchen much more entertaining friendly / better flow of the house for us, but the changes to our second and third floors also helped modernize things for us:

Our architect was really instrumental in helping us make these functional updates in a way that stays true to character of houses ours' age, yet makes it much more useful for how we plan to use the space over the next 40 years or so.

Hopefully seeing our space shuffles helps you to envision the possibilities!

Other code considerations to keep in mind: we had enough square footage on our third floor that once we touched the grandathered staircase, we were obligated to either add a 'second form of egress' or a whole house sprinkler system. The sprinklers will be installed circa March. You might ask a lot of pointed questions about those kinds of ramifications- they can add up!

@Kendrah not every house in our neighborhood has two staircases. It's actually odd that our house, being on the "smaller" end has servant stairs. Around here the only houses with 2 sets of stairs are pre-1900 with 3 stories. We're staying here for at least another 10 years. We actually almost sold the house in the summer. We have ring doorbell cameras on the front and back doors. We heard live all the feedback during the open house ha! Very insightful. Open kitchen was one of the most mentioned feedback. Some of the renovated houses around here relocate the kitchens to additions in the back, which was our first thought but our architect explained it was too cost-prohibitive because of where the plumbing and gas lines are.

@Chicago TudorReno how large is your house? The footprint is huge! Our is just 2400 sq ft total. Seems silly to even have a servant's staircase, but in the census of 1915 the first owners did have a housemaid. Our town gave our house/lot a max allowance for how much we can add according to our lot size. So everything we add on has to be thought out, and rebuilding the secondary staircase is not worth it investment-wise or required by the town for this house.

We have ~5,600 sf above grade, and a full basement. The third floor was still very much set up to be live in servant's quarters: the 'bedroom' on the left that shows a sink and stove was still a little kitchen designed for the help to use. Our lifestyle does not include live-in help, so we wanted to redo that anyway ;) The servants' stairs were the only access to the third floor- the main stairs don't go up there.

Our kitchen-in-four-parts had last been renovated in the 1940s with stainless steel cabinets that found a happy new home with neighbors who have a period-correct house for them! The doors that walled the kitchen area off from the rest of the house literally had different finishes on each side: high end quarter oak floors on the 'family' side of the house, unvarnished pine on the 'servant' side of the house, for example. It was fun to see, but so very impractical for how we use the house these days.

Great that you've already investigated what's required- surprises are the worst when undertaking big projects. While a serious undertaking, if you think this addition would be a better use of space for your family and you would include finishes true to the house's heritage... in my book that's worth considering. And while in real life I describe myself as a historical purist, I'm obviously squarely in the 'doesn't deserve to be a steward of a historic house' camp according to many users on this site ;)

Far far cheaper to just move. Or teardown and rebuild the whole.

@Verbo not really. we have done the math...it's more expensive to move if you can even find a house.

I doubt you’ve done realistic math based on real world numbers if you think that. Remodeling starts life at double the cost of new construction. And only goes way up from there.

@Verbo your response is incredibly out of touch, especially in today's market. New builds might be plentiful and cheap in parts of the country, but that's unfortunately not where I live. You can't even buy an empty lot around here

We did this— removed the back staircase and moved the basement stairs underneath the main staircase in front. I was sad to lose the charm, but the back stairs were not to code & so steep it was almost comical. We were super lucky the math worked under the front stairs— it was close. Losing the stairs really improved the options for our layout.

"The top was a quick sketch by the architect, not a final rendering"

So again, there are some huge ramifications to how the addition(s) interacts with the existing 2-story house. You want to open it up, so prepare for some beams and/or columns. In RED is the existing 2nd floor dashed line footprint on the proposed plan, and in PINK are the additions on the existing plan.

You know the bridges you drive under on the highway? Ever notice how large those beams are? In BLUE is what you will have here to support the second floor over these long distances. Want to reduce the beam sizes? In GREEN are some column locations, but you'll still see large beams below the ceiling. Unfortunately, you are using this space, now cut off from beams and columns, as part of the family room. Your room just got smaller than the Dining Room, and the sloped ceiling is goofy.

And the little addition on the back of the mudroom, you're going to dig foundations and roof a small area just to add a closet? All that work, and you can't even think of anything other than reusing the same configuration of deck stairs?

When you start schematic design, you think about these things and that helps you lay out adjacencies and start blocking. This proposed layout should have been dismissed forthwith. Frankly, an architect should know better.

@3onthetree that's my bad, I pulled a different version than the final blueprint of the mudroom. The left is the final mudroom, we're not adding a closet. I was not a fan of the proposed exterior upstairs, so I shared this with him for rooflines on the dormer windows. The proposed plan for the upstairs windows looked 80s to me.