A room reaches its full PO-tential

Ok, this was the largest bedroom in the house. It was probably one of the darkest and ugliest bedrooms I have ever seen. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to make us run screaming.

We learned a lot of things while working on this room. Like the previous owners had this thing for HUGE nails and a LOT of them. I don't know if the nails were on sale or what but we pulled out one 2 X 4 that had 63 of these nails in it. 63!

It doesn't look that large in these pictures but believe me - when you're laying hardwood floors.. you learn just how big a room is.

First order of business... moving the door to the bathroom. It was in the hallway which we had decided to turn into closets. One for each of the master suites we had planned. One thing I haven't mentioned is that we took down a lot of walls. Luckily, the roof was trussed so we could move any wall without worrying about whether or not it was load-bearing.

The photo to the left shows part of one closet and the doors of the other closet where we busted through the wall to gain access to the bathroom from the bedroom. The door on the far left is the
hallway. We tore up the carpet. Tore out the closets. We still weren't happy so we cut out a window and installed French doors to the outside.

Now... when I saw "we" cut out the window. I actually mean our very good friend, J. Again, this is when we still had friends and he volunteered. Neither of us could lift the saw that he had to use to cut through the brick exterior. It took nearly all day but there's a doorway where the window used to be.

It was late that evening before we actually got the door in. Unfortunately, I lost most of the mid-construction photos of this room. As I recall, it was relatively uneventful with one exception.

For any of those that have ever finished drywall - you know what a mess it can be. There was drywall dust everyhere.

We spent the day at the office, came to the house after work and spent all evening working. We

were ready to go back to the apartment and die but wanted to clean up the drywall dust first. Trace got the bright idea to use the leaf blower and push the dust out the doors. OMG!!! It was like a white out in the bedroom. She had to follow the power cord back to the wall just to be able to get out of the bedroom. She looked like a ghost. We just left it to settle and went home.

I'm skipping quite a few steps here - like before we put down the hardwood floors and were trying to decide what color the curtains should be. We hung one of each color on each window.

And the fact that we tore these hardwood floors out of an old house during the hottest part of the summer. We both fell through the sub-floor in that old house and I nearly clawed Trace's eyes out trying to get out because I was terrified there may have been a snake under the house. And covering up the trap door in this room that dropped down onto the water heater - purposely.

The floors turned out beautifully as you can see in the above photo. And we finally decided on curtains. This room looks nothing like the room we started with.

I did all the molding - crown, case, baseboard, and shoe molding. The door on the left is a walk-in closet. It was once the hallway. The door on the right is the bathroom. There is another walk-in closet in there. No need to put away summer clothes and pull out winter clothes - there's a closet for each. At least theoretically but we're both clothes horses so it doesn't work EXACTLY that way but pretty close.

The walls are painted with a greyish-beige color that I think is called buckskin or something like that. The ceiling is painted the palest shade of pink called Blush. The molding just makes it pop.

We still have a few finishing touches - like dropping another cable for the television. That is going to require someone to go under the house and run it and we all know by now, it isn't going to be me.

As you can see, the dogs are patiently waiting to come back in.

Voila! Finished. One room, at least..