Promised Pictures--Clumsy Home Renovations

OK, here's roughly where I am right now, about two weeks before school starts:

Coming up the stairway, we find the landing effectively blockaded by doors and drywall. You can get a glimpse of the twins' room here, along with one of our woefully overloaded bookshelves. When we're done, there will be built-in bookshelves in literally every room in the house except possibly Kane's bedroom. To the left, the entrance to what used to be another bedroom, and beyond that, the entrance to the master bedroom. That banister is beautiful oak and looks like it was made by a master, but people have painted over it with three different ugly colors over the years. One day we'll have to strip it.

Turning left, we enter the hallway. This was all one room before, but we framed in that "T" shape to divide it into two rooms and a hall. Notice the bare wall is framed with 2x8 lumber; that lets us fit two pocket doors into one wall. By making them overlap, we save a ton of space.

Looking up, you can see the trapdoor attic stairs I just installed. Originally I planned to use decorative tiles like the ones you see around here in old stores. Those are "tin" or copper, but Owens-Corning makes paintable fiber tiles that can be made to look like metal or plaster. Now I'm thinking I probably won't try to do that where the hatch is, but we'll see. What I am doing is shoving sheets of half-inch particle board into the attic while I have the opening; I want to floor the entire attic. There's usable attic over most of the house that's completely empty, while the living space is hopelessly cluttered. The hope here is to concentrate on quality of life improvements over cosmetics for now.

At the end of the hall is the door to what will be Kane's room. You can see the problem--the roofline cuts right across it. I can just about stand up straight in the center of the room. On the other hand, this room has its own stairway down to the dining room with no such issues. We'll leave this doorway, though, so he can have quick access to the bathroom we're building. Besides, if we can pass through, we can leave from the front or back stairs during a fire, for instance.
The bottom line, from Kane's point of view, was that he desperately wanted his own room, and his brother wasn't crazy about separate bedrooms at all--much less getting kicked out of "his" room! Kane proposed that he take the back room as a way of compromising, and it worked. He really is progressing.




Looking to the left, you can peek into little Sean's new room. The light fixture looks odd because the fan blades have been removed so I can paint the trim piece on the fan (plus the ceiling) before I put it all back up--and the light piece is hanging by one screw. That window was a royal pain; the old one was a foot and a half longer, but I'd rather a toddler have a window he can see through but not easily tumble through. The old windows are wood-framed, single paned, and dry-rotted beyond repair, so every time we do a room, we do the windows. The ceiling is pine tongue-and-groove; we'll paint it, but I liked that it's not standard--and that I could install it alone with a stepladder.

And a few steps further in, we come to the new bathroom. This is basically what the nursery looked like a few weeks ago--you can see where I've begun the insulationg process with expanding foam. I LOVE that stuff! This was taken before I installed the pocket door frame for the bathroom; you can see it there. It doesn't look big enough to turn around, but I'm determined that it's going to fit a 36" corner shower comfortably, with a few luxurious touches. The current "bathroom" is one floor down and on the other side of that wall on your right. The new master bath will be below this room, taking up a room the size of the one we originally subdivided to make these three spaces. The current "bathroom" will be totally gutted, the floor replaced with an actual level tile floor with its own floor drain, and the washer and dryer will be in one end of it; the other end will be the office. One cool thing about this (besides the fact that it will free up a tone of kitchen space and hide the laundry area and muffle noise) is that there's just enough room under the roofline for a laundry chute from the upstairs bathroom over and down into the laundry area. I have hope that my dirty clothes will no longer be piled in a corner of my wife's bedroom. Our bedroom is one of the things I hate most right now; my wife deserves a comfortable, romantic bedroom. What she has is cracked plaster, peeling paper, one working outlet, and ruined windows.