Would You Like One Bedroom or Two?

Pretty much as soon as we had finished our overwhelming-project-of-a-kitchen, we started work on a new project.  If you remember from the pictures, the back of the house held two teeny, tiny bedrooms.  And I mean tiny.  To make matters worse, one of them had a sliding glass door onto the back porch, making it a terrible place for a bedroom.  And the other one?  I have no idea what happened to the carpet in there, but I really don’t want to know.

Here’s the first room:

And here’s the other:

These rooms were literally 9’x9’, if that, and very awkwardly arranged.  You really couldn’t fit a queen size bed in either.  So, we decided to fix that.  Instead of a four bedroom house with two tiny box bedrooms, we decided to make it a three bedroom house with good sized rooms and an extra office. 
We started by taking out the sliding glass door.  All thanks go to Andy for doing that…

We actually found that there were three layers of siding on the house.  So, before the house was white, it was plain stained wood:

We then framed in a new door.

We borrowed the door of this little outbuilding we have:

Here’s Andy fitting the door in place:

Once that was done, we pulled up the existing flooring in room.  Our plan was to move the wall over a few feet, making this room the office.

What was I doing during all of this, you ask?  Painting, of course.  That room that the old owners so graciously painted dark blue (including the ceiling) wasn’t exactly working for us.  So, I set to the tedious task removing all the molding and then primering the walls and ceiling white.  Oh, and ripping up that nasty carpet.  Yes, gloves were used.  

 

Meanwhile, Andy worked on framing the new wall in the other room.

Next order of business?  Ripping out the old wall.  Yes, Andy had a lot of fun with that. 

Once he’d knocked out all the drywall, he started taking apart the framing.  If you plan on doing this at home, make sure you know what you’re doing.  This wasn’t a supporting wall, so it was fine to take out.

Andy used ply wood on the outside of the house where we had extended the wall.

Next came the more challenging part.  Our house had a lot of wasted space and weird architectural features.  We planned to fix that.  If you remember correctly, these two bedrooms came off of this very long hallway:

The bedroom at the end on the right (the one with the blue ceiling) was the one we were expanding.  So we decided to make the hallway shorter and the room larger by putting the door in the hallway instead.  We would gain a little niche when you first walked in.
So, once we had moved the wall, we started to take out the “useless” wall.

  

Before Andy took out the framing, though, he had to determine if this wall was load-bearing.  Meaning, we could have a big problem on our hands if we tore it out.  To do so, he had to crawl into the weird attic.  Poor guy!

Thankfully, it wasn’t, so we tore it out  There was a little extra wall where the central heating and air vent was, so we took that out too:

Andy then framed in the new doorway.

So here’s all the extra space we gained.  On the floor you can see where the old walls were.

Do you think it was worth it?  What would you have done?


Next up, “Never Paint a Ceiling Blue”.