California - Reuse

Slab-on-grade does not lend itself well to reuse, especially not when the concrete floor is the finished floor: if you move a wall, holes get left behind where the bottom plate was fastened to the concrete.  Shear walls are really impossible to move, and luckily there is only one interior shear wall, and its the central load bearing wall, so it shouldn't have to move.

The house is a one bedroom, one bath, two office layout.  One or both of the offices could become bedrooms, although neither has a closet.  The real difficulty would be adding an second bathroom which would be necessary (OK, not really necessary, but desirable) for a couple living with children or maybe a parent.  The current laundry area is oversized, so it would have to be shrunk and modified to be a bathroom as well.

The honest truth, embarrassingly enough, is that we didn't think about reuse much.  A sad fact is that in our little area many of the houses are quite large (5000SF or more), and if we ever sold the house, there a reasonable possibility that buyer would either knock it down or treat it as as large guest house.

One thing I wish we did, but didn't have the budget for was put utilities in their own layer, as is often done in passive houses (the passive institute standard): the electric wire, telephone, internet, & water supply lines would all be in this layer.  It does take up and extra 2" or so of wall thickness, but given that we're not on a city lot, that wouldn't have been a problem.