The Start of our Indoor Sports Court

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This right here has been a loooooong time in the making. We are adding on a sports court! 

Jamie spent the weekend prepping for our crews to come in and start digging this week. THIS WEEK! It still doesn’t quite feel real. We have been dreaming and planning for this project for a couple of years now. And after 2020, it’s time… 

I’m sure as you can imagine with Jamie and the boys…this won’t be any ol’ sport court…it’ll be one with ramps, bikes, and places for them to do all of their tricks and flips. Also, as a momma, slightly terrifying… 

For most, we’ve come to realize an indoor sport court is usually an indoor basketball court or gym. Since we don’t play basketball, we thought why not switch it up and make it practical for our family. 

When we bought our home four years ago, we knew this would be our forever-ish home and wanted to make it our own. One of those things we knew we would eventually do is add on a sports court and an outdoor pool. We want our home to be the “fun house” for our kids and their friends. And let’s be honest, for mom and dad too! 

This has been a goal and dream of ours for a while now, but we got serious about it and started planning in early March. And then this pandemic hit, and we really knew we wanted it NOW. As we’ve been spending so much time in our home, and we don’t see that changing anytime soon, we couldn’t be more confident and excited about moving forward on these projects. 

We quickly started working with our architect, Jennifer, at American Prairie Architects, and got design planning! 

We kept going back and forth on where we should add the sports court to our house. We debated off the back of our living room, behind our garage, or here to the west side of our house. We spent hours and hours walking around our home and talking through all of the pros and cons. The biggest factor was how we were going to enter it from the inside of our house and realize we would have to lose a bedroom and windows regardless of where we put it.

Jamie’s most important thing was he just wanted to make sure that it didn’t look like an addition from the exterior. He wanted to ensure that it all flowed and looked as if it was original to the home. In the end, after staking out multiple places on where to add it, we decided coming off of the west side of our home and dining room would make the most sense. 

So this view right here is about to change… 

Another reason we chose this side of our home is that it was the least number of windows we would have to lose. The top window is our dining room, which will now be converted into french doors to enter the sports court with a landing to hang out on and then stairs down to play. And that bottom window is a guest bedroom, which was the only bummer…we’ll be losing a bedroom, which isn’t ideal but made the most sense for us and all of the other determining factors.

Here’s a view from inside from the main level, the top windows. This window right here will soon be french doors to lead out to a landing and then staircase so we can quickly run down for emergencies. Or hang up top and watch them play. 

So soon we’ll be going from this… 

To this… 

Windows in the sports court have been another challenging design element. Typically you don’t want a lot of windows in a gym, but we also wanted it to flow with the rest of the home. So we will be doing four windows in the front to flow with the rest of the house, three on the west side, and then a sliding glass door in the back, which will walk out to the pool. 

 

Another obstacle we’re still struggling with right now is the exterior of our home. We’re not a huge fan of the beige. We’d love to go with a white, black and wood exterior… however, our fascia’s are also the same color of our siding…which means to replace everything would be super spendy…as in an additional $80-100K if we hired it out. Not to mention, our shop is the same color as our house. Do we choose the same siding as we currently have to know eventually we will probably be redoing it years from now? Or do we bite the bullet and get cruising on it now and never go on a vacation again? Haha! 

So here we go!! We are so excited to take you on this journey with us, and you bet we’ll share every single detail with you. The excavators are coming this week, so make sure to follow in stories on our Instagram if you want to see what that process is like. And if there is anything you want to know when it comes to a sports court, drop a comment below, and we’ll be sure to share the details with you as we go through this process. 

If you’re thinking about adding on a sports court of your own, we hope this journey will help to inspire you!