From day one , the very moment my mom gave me the idea of renovating Grandma’s house, the upstairs became a master bedroom. It was natural – like breathing. The second floor would be a master with a bedroom and an on suite bathroom. Simple. Beautiful. Fantastic. There was absolutely no denying it. There were a few hiccups in my plans along the way. Finding places I could put my two dressers was the first headache (they have mirrors on them that I refuse to take off so they are exceptionally tall). I ended up extending the wall that conceals the chimney, eating into the only real closet, just for a place to put the narrower of the two dressers. The other dresser ended up being a side table. Yuck. Not ideal, but it will work. My Beloved will get the side table/dresser and the big “real” closet and I will get a real side table (an old wash stand), the narrower dresser and the “closet” in the bathroom for my clothes. Recognize the furniture? You should 🙂 I redid all of this furniture last summer and they are literally going back to the same rooms we found them in. It is amazing how everything does come around full circle. Maybe these furniture pieces just don’t belong anywhere else. Wonder where the fourth piece of furniture went? There just so happens to be a perfect place for that 70s magazine rack that I refinished to match my bedroom set. It will be in the bathroom, between the tub and the toilet. Check out the last 3d image at the bottom of this post and you will see what I mean – perfect wine glass holder!

I know there will be hardwood floors under those layers of linoleum… I’ma gonna find em and I’ma gonna refinish them if it kills me. If you saw the before plan pic over in the Action Plan portion of this site, you may have noticed I made the staircase wider. You can’t blame me – it had to be wider. I’m still worried about how we’re gonna get the tub upstairs… I made the staircase wider by moving it into the master bath and into the kitchen below it. I don’t believe I had any other choice in the matter and I also don’t believe that the kitchen or the master bath suffer in any way.

If you look at the plan you can see that there is a bar for hanging clothes/a closet right in the bathroom on the left when you walk in. Ideal? No, not ideal, and it had not been my plan initially to leave the entire bathroom open. Initially I had put a wall right down the middle of it, had the vanity and my “closet” on one side of the wall and the shower, toilet and tub on the other side of the wall. I like the idea of being able to brush my teeth and someone else being able to shower (or whatever) with a closed door between us (like a hotel room). In the end however I could have two rooms that felt small/tight or one big room that was comfortable and spacious. I reserve the right to change this decision but whenever I waver over to putting that wall back up I think of that gorgeous vanity (Recognize it? Its another piece I refinished last summer) flanked by those two high windows and that beautiful mirror in between. Side note: The mirror also came out of my Grandma’s house, actually it had been (poorly) attached to the old oak dresser I also refinished into a vanity (for the main floor bathroom) and it has an ornate and beautiful frame. The frame is salvageable and I will be painting it, the mirror will be going to my aunt to be used in mosaics and I will be getting a quote here soon on how much its going to cost me to replace it… I am rather pissed that I couldn’t save it but I’m not sure what I was expecting – the mirror spent at least forty years falling off of a dresser on a screened-in porch in northern Minnesota.

Notice my excessive use of bead board here? I have been in a situation before where it is kinda hard to tell when the wall becomes ceiling and the ceiling becomes wall because of all of the slanty angles. Would you call that angled part wall or ceiling? I call it ceiling. So, then I had bead board almost entirely covering the east and west walls anyway, I didn’t see any point in sheet rocking the last five feet that was technically the wall. So I went with it and I think it looks nice and, because I’m painting all of the beard board white, it gave me the chance to use a bolder gray/blue throughout the real walls in the master. And, as you might expect, I am very excited to not have to mud and tape it because it’s not sheet rock 🙂