Year Three – The Upstairs
My upstairs to do list: install an upstairs heat pump; remodel the old Chucky Cheese bathroom, create a master bedroom in the back of the upstairs with a rebuilt deck, and build bookcases and repaint the middle section of the upstairs, which I call the library. Two rooms in the front of the upstairs were already done, my walk-in closet and the small room across from the closet, which now functions as my yoga and general chill-out room.
Original Chucky Cheese bathroom
I tackled the bathroom first, I was planning to put a mock cast iron claw foot tub in this space. But somewhere along the line, someone mentioned that those tubs were not insulated and lost heat quickly, they recommended that I consider a copper tub. I looked into it and found the most beautiful, surprisingly affordable, copper tub that just barely fit into this space. There was left over flooring from the pine floor I installed in my yoga room, enough to replace the floor in the bathroom, so once the room was gutted and sheet rocked, the new wood floor went down and got a dark stain to give it that aged look (it looked amazing). I painted the room a dark color and stenciled the back wall in gold to match the yellow glass window that I had redone the first year in the house. Out of the last of the floor boards, JW created a barrel shaped vanity base and small a cabinet, both flanking the door, topped with left over Richlite from the kitchen counter tops. The tub facet was a problem because the tub was so deep and the knees walls so low, there was no place to mount a standard faucet, so I had the idea to run flexible copper tubing up and out the ceiling, worked like a charm! This is still my favorite room in the house!
Original Chucky Cheese bathroom I tackled the bathroom first, I was planning to put a mock cast iron claw foot tub in this space. But somewhere along the line, someone mentioned that those tubs were not insulated and lost heat quickly, they recommended that I consider a copper tub. I looked into it and found the most beautiful, surprisingly affordable, copper tub that just barely fit into this space. There was left over flooring from the pine floor I installed in my yoga room, enough to replace the floor in the bathroom, so once the room was gutted and sheet rocked, the new wood floor went down and got a dark stain to give it that aged look (it looked amazing). I painted the room a dark color and stenciled the back wall in gold to match the yellow glass window that I had redone the first year in the house. Out of the last of the floor boards, JW created a barrel shaped vanity base and small a cabinet, both flanking the door, topped with left over Richlite from the kitchen counter tops. The tub facet was a problem because the tub was so deep and the knees walls so low, there was no place to mount a standard faucet, so I had the idea to run flexible copper tubing up and out the ceiling, worked like a charm! This is still my favorite room in the house!
The new Not-chucky-cheese bathroom
Sink Before
Sink After
The next project was to have heat and AC installed upstairs so I called Toler HVAC, they came out and put the unit in the area where I was planning to create my master bedroom. JW built a closet to hide the new unit but after it was closed in, the area where I was thinking to put the bed was tiny. No matter how I looked at it, unless I was willing to sleep in a single bed, there was no space to create a functional master bedroom.
The master bedroom area and broken door to the upper story deck
So I went to plan B and set up the downstairs bedroom as the master but it was a noisy room. Bellevue is a busy neighborhood with a lot of coming and going. I could hear every word of every conversation on the street. Sigh….
On to replacing the broken upstairs back door. After the new HVAC unit was installed and the old unit removed from the old deck, I realized what bad shape the deck was in when I nearly drove an old nail, which had backed out of the aging deck boards, through my foot! I hammered them all down but they backed out in just a couple months, time for a new deck. So we tore it down and rebuilt it, this time to code. Now I had a nice little deck off, the soon to be, master bedroom and I was able to put my larger house plants outside for the summer – this made them very happy.
We then tuned our attention to the “library” area. When I had lived on Seminary Ave, I had an amazing attic space I finished the attic into the master bedroom and huge bonus room/library. That room was spacious and rustic; it was an awesome space and I wanted to recreate it in a space suitable for a hobbit……
The original view of the upstairs (standing in what became the master bedroom) looking towards the front of the house into what became the library.
The above picture shows how low that upstairs ceiling really is 6’9” at the peak! You can see the old boxy book case that was rebuilt. Once the stairwell was built, the upstairs ceased being a loft. The stairwell walls flanked the skylight and gave me more wall space for a taller book case and created more privacy at the back of the upstairs.
JW built a large book case on the stairwell wall with that 1X4s that we picked up at Lowes in one of their damaged pallet sales (what a deal that was). Since my goal was to create a rustic attic/library space, I replace all the hollow core doors with hand-made bead board doors (that I built – not JW!) with rustic hardware, plus I painted the room green. JW replaced the old boxy white low bookcase with a natural wood bookcase with storage for art supplies and we put another small sky light in the roof to give the upstairs more natural light. Below is a picture of the new bookcase on the stairwell wall.
Bookcase
A view of the new low bookcase
Another view of the upstairs and the bead board doors.
Two more seemly small details made a big difference in how this space felt when it was done: the rumor about my house is that an architect who owned it, in the 80’s, was the one to make the attic into an upstairs for his two hellion children. All I can say is that this architect did not design for comfort or beauty, rather for utilitarian use. This is why, I believe, he used a metal spiral staircase to access the up-space and used very boxy/cheap materials to finish it. When finishing off the ceilings, he ran the sheet rock up into the rafters creating a reverse valley ceiling rather than a flat ceiling making overhead lighting hard to install.
Old ceiling
New ceiling
When I told JW I wanted an actual ceiling across the front of the upstairs, he groaned and complained; he did not see why he needed to figure out how to install a proper ceiling in the very out of square front section of the upstairs. But once done he agreed that it looked and felt better.
The other issue was the teeny tiny base boards. Who installs 2.5 inch base? That’s what I thought until I realized that rather than removing the base boards when they installed the wood floor, they just ran the wood up to the existing base, making it appear like the base was super short. So I added a top board to the existing base with a lambs tongue top-cap to give the base a full height. I also put a decorative cap on the window and door trim in the Yoga room. This changed the squared off trim and made it look more appropriate for the age of the house. Lastly, the wood floors, they had aged and turning an orange color – UGH! So they were sanded to remove the old stain and re-stained a more neutral color. These small details made the upstairs more interesting visually and created the feel I was looking for.
By this time, my tax abatement deadline was 3 months away, so I contacted the City to have them come out and finalize the project. They asked if I had done all the improvements that I desired and I told them that I really wanted to raise the back of the roof upstairs to create a real master bedroom but the money! They said that everything I did to the house prior to the final inspection would give my house greater value and create a much better abatement situation for me over the next 10 years. So I looked at my line of credit and dove in to make the upstairs much more livable and what I ultimately wanted.
