Second floor attic space make over!

When we moved into our house, the second floor was one big open space. There was one door to a coat closet, other than that, there was no door at all. For some reason, the previous owners never divided the upstairs rooms or put doors even for the bathroom!  Now how do you use a bathroom without a door?! We purchased the house as three bedrooms, but after closing escrow my husband and I were still scratching our heads wondering where our "other" two bedrooms are.

As the picture above, I am standing in my husband's office space looking into my blue room, to the right is the stairway. You can see that there's a "half wall" for the stair way, it is otherwise exposing the ceiling of the second floor. This comes as a inconvenience as sometimes my husband needs to work and I am blasting away on the piano or entertaining friends.

Our plan was to cover up the stairway, frame the door ways for my husband and my room as well as the bathroom.

Another view looking down the stairway. No cover!

Here the wall was cut where we plan to cover up the stair way.

Though the wall was cut, you can see the open space into the bathroom, yuck!

Framing of the stairway in place.

 

Framing of the coat closet...

 

Door framing for my husband's office.

 

Another view inside my husband's office with stairway cover framed!

View of the framing looking from my room and bathroom.

Ugly dry wall...

That "almost" looked like a door, no?

The "during" part of construction is probably most excruciating as nothing looked good just yet, but patience my friend, patience!

While the dry wall was being put up, I had ordered new doors and door knobs for the upstairs "rooms."

In the main time we had the wood panels painted white!

 

Finally, a look at the finished product!

 

Here's the stairway completely covered up. It really did not make the space seem smaller, just gave it more of the feeling of a real room!

The doors were in a five panel shaker style, complete with crystal door knobs.

 

We added small details like replacing generic ac vent covers with pretty ones!

Now a look at MY room:)

 

Again, doors and molding in consistent style, also push button switches are now installed throughout the house!

Here's a look at the chimney, built new completely from scratch. We changed the baseboard in this room to the same style as downstairs.

Push button switches, unfinished.

I had two French antique crystal sconces installed in this little alcove area, and I'm planning to replace my ugly ceiling fan with a matching crystal chandelier later on! More story about that later:)

Another close up look of the door molding...

View of the finished stairway cover, the paint color is Benjamin Moore's Bunny Grey. We installed two light fixtures purchased from Ballard Design, at the moment I'm absolutely in love with them! Again, I pretty much spent endless hours on the little details, because, well, that's just how I roll!

It was a lot of work and stress, but in the end, the result was totally worth it! We still have the upstairs bathroom waiting for a complete make over, but for the sake of my sanity, I am dealing with it as a completely different project for another time!