Thanks for the warm welcome! We are trying to be hands-on, so we designed everything ourselves (of course taking note of suggestions by the contractor). After we got our keys, we walked through the unit with our floor plan and took note of the locations of the beams. We went through a few iterations of re-quoting and redesigning with the contractor before settling on the "final" version of the design. Being a small place, our priority was functionality, and we also wanted to retain the two-room, two-bath layout of the unit. So, here's how we decided to modify the structure of the unit: Integrate the space between the rooms into the bedroom. Make kitchen smaller (we seldom cook) and giving more space for the living area and the yard. This is only possible because older units have larger kitchens. Merge bedroom with existing store room, but segment the newly created space with roller blinds for flexibility as a walk-in wardrobe. Enlarge bathroom 1 by expanding into the bedroom. Large entrances (about one arm span) for the study and kitchen for improved ventilation, lighting and spaciousness. Use sliding pocket doors for bedroom and study to increase usable space. Pink - to be hacked Blue - to be constructed With all these modifications to the internal structure, we ended up having a floor plan that looks like this:
