Holy smoke. We are officially in a 2-bedroom house now.
Remember the two bedrooms on the north end of our basement? The ones directly below Slav’s office and our current bedroom?
Well, they are now one big room…
It has been a long struggle to find a purpose for the basement bedrooms. They are small, with tiny closets, and unavoidably dark. Initially, we considered renting the whole basement out as a 2b/1b suite. After all, it was a finished space when we bought it. Although we did not like the finishes (carpet + paneling), it was still acceptable as a rental with a fresh coat of paint. But having only one laundry facility in the basement made this plan difficult to execute.
We also considered to convert the basement into a short-term rental + a guest suite by adding a private entry. But we quickly nixed the idea due to cost of cutting into the foundation and creating a new entry. Most recently, we tossed around the idea of using the bedrooms as Slav’s office + additional media room. However, this plan would have resulted in no guest bedroom in our house, which is not ideal.
As we were weighting on these options, the basement stayed empty. 18 months in, we decided to get rid of all the unwanted fixtures in the basement. Our hope was that reducing this space to its bare bone could inspire the best usage for it. To my surprise, this plan worked! During demo, we discovered the I-beam support for our house, which opened the possibility of removing the dividing wall between the bedrooms and make them one big room. This option was never on the table before. But as soon as it popped up, we could not get it out of our minds.
Slav and I are both highly intuitive people, which can be a blessing and a curse. Before we decided how to use the combined room, the dividing wall had already come down.
In fact, the dividing wall was not merely a wall, but hosting two neighboring closets. This setup is commonly seen in old houses and identical to the former closets in our bedroom and Slav’s office, which we reversed to both face the bedroom.
This was the northeast bedroom closet, neighboring a wall of graffiti. I do not miss it one bit.
The soffit above is actually an air duct painted white, and the pipe in front belongs to the HVAC system.
Behind the wall of graffiti was the closet in the formal northwest bedroom. Weirdly, the two closets was connected via an small opening. The previous owner has a small dog – maybe this opening was made for the dog?
We are fully aware the consequence of removing closets – by our city code, a bedroom has to have a closet that meets minimal size requirement. Removing these two closets and reversing the closet in Slav’s office technically reduced the number of coded bedrooms in our house to one. But closet is fairly simple to construct, and we are not planning to sell this house any time soon, so we went ahead with the demo.
Demoing the closets gave the new room good lighting from all three sides. This space became a lot more bright and pleasant throughout the day. It is amazing how a space can speak for itself. As soon as the demo was done, we knew that it would become our new master bedroom.
The east side of this 240 sqft space will host our king bed. With the headboard against the east wall, there will be plenty room on either side of the bed to walk around. One complain Slav has for our current bedroom is the space between the bed and his side of the wall is too narrow.
The west side will become a dressing area. We will be building floor-to-ceiling wardrobe closets around the two windows. There closets will be big enough to host all of clothes, camping gears, and linings.
There is also a 3/4 bathroom right off the former northeast bedroom door. In the picture below, the door direct in front leads to a lining closet, which will stay and become our bathroom closet. The bathroom is to the left.
It was the bathroom that inspired me to move the master bedroom downstairs. Slav and I both prefer a 3/4 bath to a full bath. We never liked taking showers in a bathtub and even talked about relocating the bathtub in our current bathroom to the basement bath. It never occurred to us that we could just move the bed!
The doorway on the right leads to the living area. You can also see this doorway better from the picture below. We will be adding a lockable door here and taking down the current bathroom door to add more floor space.
The door on the left in the picture above used to lead to the northwest bedroom. It will become the main entry to the master.
There are a couple things we need to address here, such as how to deal with the exposed ducts here. The old air duct extends into the room by a few feet. It not only supplies air to the basement bedrooms, but also to our current bedroom and Slav’s office on the main floor. It has to stay, and so does the HVAC line. We would need to build a soffit to enclose them.
Removing the closet framing also exposed the I-beam above. We will likely to enclose it in the same soffit with the ducts.
We also found the third supporting column (grey) tucked away in one of the closets.
My mind has been spinning since the birth of this new room. With a 3/4 bathroom next to it, and the location of the doors, it is so inclined to be a master bedroom. On the same note, our current bedroom is a much better choice for guests. It is moderate in size, near a full bath, and on the main floor.
While Slav is pocking around in the bathroom, I cannot help but thinking how I want this space to feel. As I get older, I’ve been craving more traditional Chinese elements in my space. For example, I’ve always liked the look of symmetrical partition walls as separation between two connected areas. We kind of did it in the Slav’s office by keeping some walls on both sides of the opening.
I would like to repeat the partition walls in the new master. The space is long and narrow and I think a pair of partition walls will work wonders between the sleeping area and the dressing area. Moreover, I’d like to do something more elaborate than just drywall, such as wood carving designs:
Or some kind of moon gate like this. When used in bedrooms there are usually curtains hanging on one side of the moon gate to add privacy.
There’s still lots of work to do before we build up the bedroom. We will take the opportunity of the room being a blank slate to do some basic improvements including lighting, electrical, and soundproofing. It means that we might need to open up more walls and ceilings. We are also considering adding an egress window, which will involves cutting into foundation walls and has to be done by professionals. This will be our second Christmas in the ranch and somehow we managed to make drywall dust in both years. Fortunately the mess will be contained in one floor and kept out of our living space!
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