House in Progress Diary

Opening a New Front in the Battle

Today we began a new chapter in our assault on the house...the master bedroom!

Up until now, our work on the second floor has been limited to cleaning (the previous owner left a lot of stuff up there!), repair work (the replacement windows) and a lot of dreaming (the infamous 'open source bathroom' contest). In recent weeks, that space has been mostly left empty and we've only gone up there for showers and for occasional dreaming about a future without all this chaos. But that all changed today, when we started work on the master bedroom!

Since moving in, our goal has been to make the master bedroom the heart of our upstairs "retreat" from the ongoing mess of home improvement. This weekend it felt good to finally start work and move this dream from concept to reality...

We've knocked around various ideas to make it unique and cozy and we've come up with this:

Before

After

Our new floorplan represents a number of major changes:

- Removing the closet installed inside the bedroom (circa 1970's).
- Converting the original closet of the neighboring bedroom into a "nook" for the master bedroom. (You can't tell from the floorplan, but the ceiling of this nook angles down towards the front of the house, matching the roofline, to create a very cozy space.)
- Enlarging the master closet in the master bedroom by borrowing a little from the neighboring master bathroom (which originally was a bedroom at as well...now it's an awkwardly long bathroom.)
- Raising the collar joints on the dormer to create a "barrel" ceiling and a more expansive feel to the bedroom. (We're also hoping to cover the ceiling with beadboard for a cozy look.)

So, with the goal of completing the full second floor by late winter, we started to open up the space today by removing the former closet and wall to the nook. Here's what it looked like before we started:

First, we removed the existing 1970's closet after carefully removing the baseboards that they had recycled! (Did these come from our living room...maybe so.) Look closely and you can see the outline of the future "nook" marked with duct tape:

Then we removed the wall for the "nook" down to the studs:

Fun! Destruction has been more fun than construction so far. Now we just need to figure out what to do with all of the nail-filled scrap wood...

Unlike our predacessor and unless it is wood from the trim, we will probably NOT be storing it in the basement or the garage. We have enough scrap wood in this house to build a second house...if it were in one piece. Without existing nails.

p.s. Note from J: (Isn't there always a last word? :) Instead of whacking away at the walls with a hammer, we used the "deconstruction opportunity" to practice straight lines with the SawZall...regardless of the plaster dust. No better time to get in the game for when we are cutting smaller holes in walls that we want to actually KEEP...

Posted by aaron on November 16, 2003 at 8:25 PM