A little housework – remodling the attic

After a few weeks of Jamie getting on my case about moving the attic redesign project I finally got off my keester and did some work.

Here’s some back story:

Jamie and I live at home with my parents. Yeah go ahead and laugh, but we are saving a lot of money in the long run while we both go to school. It also allows us to get into a better financial situation so that when we do move out it is to a nice area and not the ghetto. We have the entire third floor of the house to ourselves. It’s the attic, but completely finished and not like 3 foot ceilings or anything. The room is big enough for two people easily, just running out of room for dressers and desks. The outside of the room used to be a computer/workspace for my father, but we moved his computer stuff into the basement since he has a laptop now that he uses in the living room. We are going to move half the dressers outside the room, leaving more space for us to move around and allow us to get a bigger bed. Two people sleeping on a twin is NOT FUN AT ALL. Outside the room has two parts, divided by the stairs to the rest of the house. The other side not directly outside the room is smaller due to 2 slopes of the room. We are going to put storage bins and hang our jackets over there to utilize that space.

Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the before, but some of these pictures will show you what the layout was and where things were. I’ll explain along the way.

Here is our room currently. There are 4 dressers, 2 computer desks, a DVD shelf and a stand with photos and nick-nacks. Talk about cramped. On both sides of the room there are what we call outcoves (not sure if thats a p.c. term). Those are full of our storage bins and laundry, but we can barely get at them because of dressers in the way.

Here is a picture of the outcoves outside the room. They are a great use of space since the slope of the roof makes it impossible for the walls of the room to meet the outer walls. You would have to be 1 foot tall to fit in those, we have to crawl, but hey, storage bins fit great!

This is the spot outside the room next to the door. It used to be my father’s computer desk. I am going to make a clothing rack there now because closet space is very limited as well.

This shot is outside the room from the angle of the doorway. The dresser to the left is our new 5th one, but that was not always there. That was put there after some of today’s demolition of a fixed shelf I did. This is where I wish I had the before picture, but its not hard to imagine a shelf I guess. You can see the crappy clothing rack I have now; damn thing falls over like once a week.

Here is the left side of the upstairs outside the room. It’s the part where you have to cross the stairs to get to with the double sloped roof. You can see the desk I removed as well as all the pieces of the shelf (too lazy to bring them downstairs at midnight).

Here’s a closeup of the old shelf. My father builds things to last so it was pretty tough getting it apart.

This is where the old shelf was. It was also good to have there so you couldn’t fall right off and down the stairs. We are going to put in a small wall or backer of some sort behind the dresser to secure it or us from falling. You can see the old spot on the wall on the right where the shelf started and went across to the gray poll on the left.

Here’s a front shot of the new dresser and where the shelf used to be. See what I mean how you can just fall off down the stairs!

Now it’s time to kick back and relax with my Molson Canadian and trusty Peak bottle opener, courtesy of 107.1 The Peak (one of the radio stations I do work for). It’s the last one, so I bought myself some Molson XXX for next. If you can’t tell I am a fan of Canadian beer. Well that and Heineken.

Tomorrow I’m off to Home Depot to get some wood to create the backing to that empty spot as well as pick out paint colors with Jamie. She wants to go with a blue, chocolate brown, and some tanish color. It sounds bad, but it looks good.