Ellen and Scott Horner live in a two-story traditional house off East Franklin Street with their two children, 4-year-old Audrey and 9-year-old Mary.

Ellen calls the 1965 house indistinctive on the outside, with its lower brick exterior and upper vinyl siding. But the house, near trails and Battle Creek Park, best met the family's needs. The Horners bought it in June when they moved from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., so Scott could join the other partners in his multimedia company. The company, Swarm Interactive, specializes in medical animation and web development and has an office on Franklin Street.

"I wanted to have some nature," Ellen said. "We were looking for at least four bedrooms either really close to Franklin Street or else far out with some nice land."

The house was close enough to Scott's office that he could walk to work, and it had the full basement that Ellen wanted. The classical saxophonist -- who now makes music her hobby -- homeschools their two daughters and wanted a place where they could do messy projects.

"We looked at a lot of houses, and this is the one that came closest to suiting our needs," Ellen said. "But, of course, it didn't quite exactly. This one actually had six bedrooms plus an office, which was more bedrooms than the four of us plus guests would need to fill up."

Four of the bedrooms were on the top floor, and two bedrooms were in the basement. The Horners knew they eventually would convert the basement into one guest bedroom and a family room. But they also wanted to renovate the top floor to create bigger bathrooms. They decided focusing on the top floor first, before moving all their furniture in, made more sense.

The Horners moved into the basement of their home, and Ellen soon started interviewing contractors.

The Challenge

With the basement's bedrooms, the top floor had one more bedroom than the family really needed. But what it also had were very tiny bathrooms.

"In the master bath, you couldn't open the cabinet door all the way because the door would hit the toilet," Ellen said. "You couldn't open the shower door if the bathroom door was open."

There also wasn't much storage space in either bathroom. The Horners' daughters share the hall bathroom, which had a small cabinet under the sink and no place for additional storage.

"There wasn't room for the stuff that they need at this1age, and there certainly wasn't room for the stuff they'll need when they're older," Ellen recalled.

In addition, the couple wanted more closet space in their bedroom. The master bedroom had two reach-in closets. The Horners wanted to create a walk-in closet.

Two of the four bedrooms were very small, as well -- too small for their daughters and all their belongings.

"As soon as we put an offer on the house, Scott came home and started laying out different plans for the upstairs," Ellen said. "The challenge was figuring out how to fit everything. We wanted to keep the destruction to a minimum to keep the costs down."

They also wanted to ensure that each bathroom had natural light, so their plans had to take into account where their windows were.

"We came up with a plan that moved a lot of walls and gave Audrey a better closet for her bedroom," Ellen said.

Yet tearing down all those walls and then having to redo the flooring would have proved too costly. Another plan moved every door.

"It got way out of hand deciding what we wanted," Ellen said. "Every night after Scott got off work, he would get on the computer and move walls around. I went to bed, and he was still pushing walls around on the computer. That went on for quite a while."

The two just couldn't figure out how they could give their girls larger bedrooms and create bigger bathrooms and more storage space without putting their master bedroom on a different floor.

The Solution

Going against the practice of parents getting the largest bedroom, Ellen and Scott gave their house's master bedroom to their eldest daughter. They gave the second biggest bedroom to their younger daughter and converted the two small bedrooms on the other side of the second floor into a master suite.

"It took a while to come to that point of realizing this would work out best for us," Ellen said.

By giving their daughters the largest bedrooms, they were able to leave those bedrooms unchanged. The only exception is they closed off the doorway from Mary's bedroom into the original master bathroom. Because the master and hall bathrooms were back to back, they were able to remove the wall between the two bathrooms to create one larger hall bathroom.

Another wall was removed between the two smallest bedrooms, and the smaller of the two became Ellen and Scott's master bathroom and walk-in closet.

"Our bedroom is actually smaller than the other bedrooms, which might hurt resale value," Ellen said. "But we're figuring we're going to be in this house for at least 15 years."

In addition to worries about resale, they also were worried they wouldn't be able to fit a dresser for Scott into a smaller master bedroom.

"Scott decided he didn't need a dresser; he would just use the closet," Ellen said.

They used Carolina Closets Plus and had a drawer system installed into their walk-in closet for Scott.

"As construction was going on, I was getting worried about how small the space was," Scott noted.

They had hired Herndon Construction to complete the renovation.

"But it turned out fine because we don't really need a large bedroom. We don't have a lot of toys to place in here," Scott added, laughing.

The couple left their bedroom furniture in the basement to be used as the guest bedroom set, and Ellen replaced her former wide dresser with a tall dresser to fit their smaller bedroom.

"The room doesn't look crowded," Ellen said, "but we can't fit all the furniture in the world in there. It looks pretty bare in the room but we went with a Zen kind of design, so it's supposed to look bare."

The Materials

The Horners reused materials where they could. The original master bathroom vanity, light fixtures and faucets became part of the girls' newly expanded bathroom. A mirror in the foyer of their former house became the mirror for that same bathroom. Teak shelves in the hallway linen closet became the shelves for an open storage space in the new master bathroom.

"They're not very good for a linen closet because they're not very deep," Scott said. "I didn't want to throw them away."

A piece of driftwood became a hand towel bar for the master vanity.

"That was Scott's inspiration," Ellen said.

"We found it in San Francisco about 12 years ago," Scott added. "It's just been sitting on a shelf ever since. It's the cheapest thing in the remodel."

Scott spent a lot of time searching online for other materials for their home and used www.overstock.com quite a bit, including for a vessel sink for their vanity and a wood-framed mirror over the vanity. The sink is glass with a metal surface with swirl patterns on the outside.

"We were trying to stick with wood, glass and metal," Scott said of the natural materials they chose for their bedroom and bathroom, which includes a granite countertop for the vanity and a pebble strip for the floor outside the shower. "So the sink is neat."

"And it's musical, too," Ellen added, flicking it with her fingertip to let loose a musical ring.