Winter comes to Michiana

No, that's not a typo. Our little area of Indiana, as well as nearby Michigan, is collectively called "Michiana." It's used on the news, weather, radio and TV ads... After a while, it even starts to sound normal. And, it's even pretty accurate, since I could see Michigan, if I were to climb up on my roof. They don't even bother putting up "Michigan" signs when you enter Michigan, except on maybe 2 roads, so you can unexpectedly find yourself in another state.

But anyways...

Progress on the house has come to something of a standstill. I haven't been able to strip wallpaper, because my shoulder is acting up. I injured it playing basketball in the 7th grade, but it just hasn't been the same since. Shayne's been working a lot of part-time hours, so he's been too busy or tired to do anything with the ceiling. His friend Phil, who does drywall work, will be coming over next week to take a look at the ceiling to see what it would cost to skim-coat it. We'd be helping, but we thought it would be a good idea to have someone along who knows what the heck they're doing.

I've been thinking a lot about the bathroom again. I think we're at a concensus that it will be our next project. Both of us love baths, and we're really starting to feel the lack of a real bathtub. The one we have is maybe 6" deep. When I fill it to the overflow and sit in it, it doesn't even completely cover my thighs. And I'm not big at all!! So, in order to have a bathroom that will accomodate both a big, clawfoot or pedestal tub and a stand-up stall shower, we're thinking of expanding the bathroom into the hall closet, which has a lot of wasted space, due to the strangeness of its design. Here is the floor plan as it is now:
The hall closet is situated between the bathroom and office, and has doors opening into the hall and the bedroom. Not shown in the picture are the shelving unit at the back (on the bathoom wall) and the clothes rods (on the bedroom wall). There is also another hanging rod directly inside the hall door. The shelves are really not being used, since the clothes rods block them from both doors. So... we were thinking of taking up the wasted space taken up by the shelves and using it as a bathtub alcove, like in the plan below.
We could still use 18" or so of the space as a closet, plus, since we will be replacing the wall between the office and master bedroom closet, we could add a second closet in that area. The current master bedroom closet has about 4 or 5 feet of space that is all but inaccessable, due to the placement of the doors, so the new closet would utilize that space.

The purist in me is rebelling against adding/removing/changing walls. The logical side (as well as the part of me that wants a nice, big bathroom) is reminding me that 3 of these 5 walls were added to begin with and have nothing to do with the original plan of the house. And, we'd reuse the current original closet door in one of the new closets, so we wouldn't be losing character.

It's definitely worth thinking on.