Here are some before and after photos from another renovated area of our 1800’s home project.
This room could be considered one of the four bedrooms in our home, but we chose to turn it into our home office.
It features a large closet as well as a door that opens to reveal a screened-in porch, known as a “sleeping porch”. When you open the door to the porch and then open the master bedroom window and door (there is a door between the office and master bedroom) a beautiful breeze sways into the home. This would have been an ideal way to cool the entire second floor in the 1800’s when air conditioning didn’t exist.
Little did we know that screening in the porch would also provide our Maine Coon cats their favorite spot to hang out in when the weather is good. They love watching the birds, squirrels and bees!
Read on to see the details of the entire renovation of this room.
Design, Renovation and Photography by Tommy and Carolyn Braden
What we did:
Removed the carpet
Removed the drop ceilings
Removed the layer of thin drywall plus two layers of wood paneling
Cleaned and shellaced the doors and original trim (luckily we found it behind the wood paneling and drywall layers)
Hung a new drywall ceiling and walls
Laid new carpet (carpeting this floor proved to keep our heat bills lower in the winter as the heat doesn’t all rise from the 1st floor to the second anymore as it did when we had the wooden floors bare)
Laid faux wood vinyl flooring in the closet.
Painted the walls and ceiling
Hung a new ceiling fan/light
Wired and hung a secondary light to brighten the room.
Screened in the porch and laid turf-like carpeting
You can see a air conditioning window unit in the “before” photo. Before moving into the home, we had a central heat/air conditioning unit installed to heat and cool the first and second floors, then added in-room heat and air units to the attic space.
NOTE:
With the help of my husband’s father, we have completed all the renovations ON OUR OWN.
AND FYI—none of us are contractors or have backgrounds in this kind of work. We’ve just researched and learn as we go! You can learn a lot from YouTube too!