Bedroom Renovations
Bedroom renovations are similar to other (non-kitchen and non-bathroom) living area renovations, with one big difference. Closets. Your living rooms, dining rooms, family rooms, rec rooms and rumpus rooms are usually variations on boxes, and bedrooms are the same. Except that they have those other boxes in them, closets we mean, and those have lots of neat little storage solutions and other tricks to them.
Here’s another in the ‘before and after’ series – bedroom edition this time around:
Before Bedroom Renovation:
After Bedroom Renovation:
OK, as you can see, we snuck in a second ‘after’ picture here, in a radical departure from tradition. Why would we do such a thing? Simple. The closets made us do it.
A lot of this bedroom renovation involved the pretty standard ‘box room’ stuff. Spruce up the floors, patch and paint, upgrade fixtures … standard stuff. But because it’s a bedroom, the closets really were the story.
This century home apparently started out kind of like in the first ‘after’ picture, with a beautiful plaster arched inset area on the left side wall. That was beside the small closet to its right. Small little closets in bedrooms were all the rage back then it seems.
Anyway, over the years, it seemed that more closet space was sought and the archway was doored-over to make some. That’s what we see in the ‘before’ picture.
We were able to restore the original plaster archway in the course of the reno, returning this charming feature to the room. The only problem – now there weren’t enough closets again.
Hence why we had to break all the rules and include a second ‘after’ picture of the other side of the room. Lo and behold, crisis averted, more closets! A simple solution – build another little room (the closets) inside the main room. Closets should be 24″ deep (minimum), so with the closet walls being 4 1/2″ thick, all told they can occupy a strip of bedroom as narrow as 28 1/2″. If you have a strip of bedroom that wide that you can spare, you too can have more closets.
We built these new closets pictured above with jamb switches controlling the lights in them. So, when you opened a closet door, the lights came on automatically. Pretty cool option, although standard wall switches work quite nicely as well, and probably beat the jamb switches in a pro/con analysis. The jamb ones are neat though!
Running low on closet space? Contact your friendly neighbourhood contractor about construction of more closets in your bedroom. Don’t go and slap track doors over quaint architectural features!