In Progress

The room remodel is underway!

A roll-top desk is going to be moved into the room, in front of the chair, along the wall. There's another cabinet like the small one on the floor by the chair; they'll go above the desk as a place for books that are being moved from the office room to this bedroom. The taller cabinet is for Miss M's clothes.


This is the Wall of Cabinets. It goes all the way to the ceiling.


The cabinet has shelves, not drawers. They're replacing what was in two large chest of drawers and a tall loungerie chest, plus they have additional space for sheets and blankets.


There's going to be a shelf for books running along two walls up high near the ceiling - about fifteen feet of shelf (we have lots of books being moved into the room!)

A Clearplay DVD player and TV are going to be in this room, too - no idea where to put those. Possibly above Miss M's cabinet? Tim and J sometimes watch movies that L and Miss M are too young for, and it's going to be better to have them locked in the room watching their movies than to try to lock the little kids in this room watching a kids movie because the unsuitable movie is being viewed in the family room (that's how we'd been doing it up til now). A little bookshelf will be going in beside the desk, just under the window. The bed was moved to the other window, and a wide headboard will be built to fit a file cabinet near the roll-top desk. That window by the bed is a second-story window, so we installed a window guard to keep Miss M from climbing the headboard and going out the window.

We've already encountered a problem - Miss M can't resist opening the new cabinet doors and banging them shut. We considered putting child-proof locks on them to keep her from doing that, but we decided it would be easier to put a child-proof gate up to keep her out of the room altogether. Since there will also be a desk in there, she really doesn't need to be using it as a play-room. It will just be a place for her to sleep and store her clothes. Most days, Mr. B will either be sleeping in there or working at the desk, so she won't be able to play in there most times, anyway.

The room has a lot more storage, yet doesn't feel any smaller since we moved up toards the ceiling instead of added more furniture. It's also bright and looks very simple and neat rather than cluttered - that's important when you're fitting two rooms of stuff into one room.

Remodel in progress

Back in March I posted about our plans to do some room shifting to move Tim to his own room. He'll be getting the guest room that Mr. B uses as his office. We're slowly doing things, one at a time, to make that happen. First, we're getting the master bedroom ready to hold stuff for three people (Miss M is in our room) that currently takes up two rooms.

The first step was this nifty closet above our bedroom door in the hallway to make room for stuff. It has a hinged door to hide the clutter, and it's about 4 feet suare and a foot high, so a lot of stuff will fit into it. Right now it's holding sewing/craft stuff.




Then we replaced the toilet and sink in the master bath. The pedestal sink makes the tiny room look bigger, and, as it turns out, it was the cheapest one in Home Depot. Baseboards will be a project for another day.



And the wall of cabinets is sitting in the basement, ready for assembly:

Remodeling

Mr B has always planned to add on a new master bedroom over the garage with a walk-out patio by the time Tim was old enough to need his own space. Well, that time has come, but the finances aren't available to do a room addition.

So - Plan B.

Mr. B has been using our third bedroom as an office/daytime sleeping room (so we can still the master bedroom and bathroom when he's sleeping) and we use it when we have guests. The plan is to move his office into the master bedroom and let Tim move into that third bedroom.

The problem is storage - Miss M is in our room, so we have three of us in the room, plus all the bedding for the entire household, sewing, toy storage and other things that have nowhere else to go (we have no linen closet). The solution - remodel the room so we can fit all our stuff in there! I've always loved the challenge of trying to get as much storage into as small a space as possible while avoiding a crowded, cluttered look. It's not always successful or possible, but I like to try anyway.

Tim has been graphing out the proposed changes, and this is what we're looking at so far:

Low bed, but with room for storage bins underneath. Mr B will put a mattress on a cheap frame and build legs (he's done it before) and build a headboard far enough away from the wall to hide a file cabinet behind it for his desk stuff, leaving room for a very large cabinet for bedding behind half of the headboard.

A high shelf around two full walls so Mr. B can move his 19 feet of books into the room (and that still leaves shelf space for other needs).

A narrow cabinet that doesn't come out too far from the wall (because the bathroom door is right there, and the dresser we have there now is a bit of an obstruction).

Mr B's roll-top desk is being moved into the room, and a cabinet put above it to hide desk clutter.

One full wall of floor-to-ceiling cabinets, a clean, uncluttered, bright improvement over the piles of clutter atop two dressers we have now. It's inexpensive (comparitively speaking) melamine cabinetry, the kind you can pick up at Walmart or Home Depot, but it will suit our needs and I've always favored efficiency, light and lack of clutter over style.

The walls were painted light yellow (it's called "Lemon Ice") and the valances over the windows are white (the room gets the best light in the mornings, and those colors really accentuate that!) There's one big space of wall by the desk with room for a nice print - I'm thinking a beautiful Bouguereau poster.

You can see how it might look below (the thing coming down from the ceiling isn't an oven hood, it's a fan/lamp, but trying to create it in the graphics wasn't worth the time):

But wait - that's not all! In the hallway, Mr B is going to put another long, long high shelf, just above the door frames, the length of the hall like in the bedroom, and a wider cabinet at the end of the hall where our bedroom door is - and we'll finally have a linen closet! A bit high, but, oh, how nice it will be to get all that stuff up out of sight and out of the way!

Tim is busy now plotting out how he might arrange his "new room." :)

And J has been hinting for weeks (not so subtly) that he has his own ideas about how he'll use all the space he and L will gain when Tim moves out of their room.