Our Own One Room Renovation Challenge: Master Bedroom Plans

Hi all! Did you see our awesome news from earlier this week? Well, with that exciting announcement you can see why we have another driving force to get hustling with renovations to our upstairs bedrooms so that they’re more livable.

Up till now we have been using the smallest back bedroom for ourselves – the other three are an office, temporary storage room, and then the future master bedroom that needs work.

Get ready for some major “reality” pix…renovations and being in a state of limbo ain’t pretty, hehe. Here’s the current temporary “master” bedroom which we lovingly refer to as the “spare oom” (Narnia fans? Anyone?).

Our mattress is on the floor because we couldn’t fit our boxspring up the stairs. #oldhouseproblems ;) The room is barely able to fit our queen bed; the former owner had a twin in it beforehand and it was still a small space then. It could be used as a very small bedroom or single-person office, but we have other plans for it that I’ll get to in a moment.

On the other side of the wall pictured (above) is the future master bedroom. The future master bedroom, also referred to as the “red room” for which I hope it’s easy to see why…

What Needs Work:

One good thing about waiting six months to get started on our master bedroom is that we’ve lived here for six months, which has helped us determine which room to designate as our master. Ironically enough, the red room is not the largest bedroom of the four. However, we chose it for the location. It sits in the back of the house and offers the prettiest views, adjoins the “spare oom”, and provides more options for how we use the space.

This is the only room with a modern-day sized closet, but unfortunately it hasn’t much space when we combine both our clothes in it.

The rods are also badly spaced, so clothes on the higher levels hang over the bottom level. The small built-in tv cubby and shallow bookcase to the right of the closet is useless for our needs and therefore a waste of space that could be better utilized.

Thus, we have 2 options for expanding closet space for this room:

1) we raise the doors and rods of the closet and take out the bookcase, allowing us to make a wall-to-wall closet.

2) we knock out the wall for a doorway between the red and spare oom and make the spare oom into a dream walk-in closet.

Now, in reference to option #2 I must pause here and state that I’m ALL about keeping the original features of an old home and often cringe at how much wall removal happens in Fixer Upper or when any other renovation show does an old house. However, if it does indeed help functionality and isn’t a HUGE difference (such as a doorway being created or enlarged) I can let it go.

With option #2, it’s a door, and that is something that is easy to always go back and remove if we decide down the road we want to make it its own bedroom again (though it’s doubtful as we have a whole unfinished attic waiting to be made into finished rooms). Another clincher is that upon taking off a wallplate and examining what was behind it, we discovered that particular wall had been drywalled, which is something we had previously learned was also the case with the interior walls of our living room.

We won’t know until we start knocking holes if a doorway is possible, but now that we know it’s drywall, we feel better about being able to at least easily patch it if option #2 fails.

If #2 doesn’t fail, we’ll be tearing out the current wall closet, making the master bedroom’s square footage a bit bigger.

The other obvious part of this project would be the carpeting. Underneath the bulging and creepy red carpet (old carpet is just creepy when you think of all that could be in it – ugh) is the original wood floor as we’ve discovered from a corner of the room. We won’t know the floor’s condition until we pull the carpet up, so we’re really crossing fingers it’s in good shape and that we may even be spared from having to refinish them.

Last of course would be the wall color. I’ve had a visual in my mind for months now, so a mood board will be coming.

We’re starting demo tomorrow, so things will hopefully start moving along! We aim to have everything move-in ready 4-6 weeks from now – yikes!

If you’d like some behind-the-scenes, catch me on Instagram this weekend as Karl knocks holes. If you’re doing any projects this weekend as well, take a pic of your project and tag me @dravenmade on Instagram (we’ll be project buddies!).

Have a good weekend, everyone, and we’ll have an update on what we’ve messed up progress has been made next week! [update: see master bedroom demolition day here]

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