Saturday, April 25, 2009

Creating a master bedroom


So we're back to work after going to Minnesota to visit family for a weekend. Our focus is the upstairs, we want to move up before summer gets here. It's been a long process, plagued by long work weeks, lives outside our house, and complacency, punctuated by occasional bouts of fun. But we're back at it with a vengeance.

Today we wainscoted the master bedroom (we had finished bedroom #2 a few weeks ago) and got started on the wall treatments for the media room/lounge (vote on the room name later). When we first saw the soon-to-be master bedroom, it was filled with guitars, furniture from every era, and painstakingly placed cut-outs from muscle car magazines that had been pasted to the walls (thank you Arnolds). Wherever the muscle cars weren't, there was faux walnut Formica paneling. The dipping ceiling was held in place with fender washers. You may ask, "what were they thinking?" Truth is, we saw a lot of potential, but maybe not all the hard work involved.
The room prior to our purchase, note the guitars and car images pasted on the wall and single light fixture that was also the only outlet

The ceiling, before our efforts. The treatment looked like wrapping paper and you can see the fender washers that were holding it in place.


It's been a long process. To get to this point, we had to build an addition with functional stairs so that we could haul materials (and eventually a bed) up, rewire and update the HVAC system, wrack our brains over how to reconfigure the space, and find inspiration to get started. More on all that work later.

To create a master bedroom, we closed off a doorway to an adjacent room, jacked the ceiling and sistered on new joists to the existing joists, created a new ceiling with plywood and sheetrock, replastered the walls, rewired and added several outlets, created a closet, and painted the walls and added wainscoting. We spent over an hour this evening at Menards looking at floor treatments.

The closet, the small speck on the wall is the lone guitar that we left intact


The muscle cars after the paint and before the wainscoting


Covering up the cars

Our message for anyone who removes the wainscoting


To finish the room we need to: install floor treatment, paint the trim and wainscoting, install closet and entry doors and closet system, and haul everything from our temporary bedroom upstairs. More images to follow as we wrap everything up.

It's been a sad week, we lost our faithful remodeling assistant, Brew, our 11 year old lab mix. She tended to get underfoot, but was eager to help with the beer drinking at the end of the day and never criticized our work.
Brew inspecting our progress


Lessons Learned: The Arnolds LOVED guitars and muscle cars, we're still awesome at picking paint colors, and white glue is a good muscle car-to-wall adhesive.

Items founds: Secret nudie image behind the Formica wall, sewing needle under a baseboard, old newspaper fragments, four different wallpaper examples, a few lone guitar images among the muscle cars, and a Winchester rifle warranty.

Thank you: Everyone who helped us build the addition so we could continue to work upstairs, Isaac for helping mud and sand the sheetrock, Jason for helping with the electrical, and Bonnie and Loren for helping to haul all the plywood and sheetrock upstairs over Thanksgiving weekend.

1 comment:

  1. Hi! Isaac Pettis here, I'm just now looking at your page for the first time, and wow- you've come a long way :-) the place is looking better than ever I'd wager with confidence! keep it up my brother.

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