DIY Project – Diary Week 6

The bathroom is finished – at last! The newly mirrored door arrived; the mirror wasn’t broken this time en route. It took almost a day to install it into its sliding gear – but we’ve made it! Whilst waiting for the door, I cleared out the bedroom, which has been used as a dressing (and junk) room since January. This took me a couple days. Unfortunately our office is no longer clutter-free. I had to locate a few boxes of clothes there – making it almost impossible to get to the cabinets. But there was nowhere else to put things…other that the garden which is already full of junk: the old bath suite, doors and dozens of boxes full of our kitchen gadgets and utensils – which, it seems, we can live perfectly without..

 Having cleared the bedroom, I took out the old dirty carpet from both the bedroom and the hall and chucked it all in the bin. The area was now ready to attack. I’m just not happy with the layout of the bedroom, or the top floor for that matter – so we decided to get rid of the useless built-in cupboard that intrudes into the hall, and rebuild the wall – with an inserted sliding door. The hall will become a bit bigger and we can install a couple of floor-to-ceiling wardrobes – this would give us about three times more wardrobe space than we had with the original layout and almost the same amount of floor space.

The bedroom is quite small – about 5.5m x 3m – so I thought of it as being like a cabin in a boat, where every bit of space counts. I designed a floating bed that has storage underneath and all around it. A narrow cabinet (with a top lid) behind the bed acts as the headboard, a shelf and a useful storage for bedcovers and pillows. Above it there will be wall-mounted cabinets – kind of floating in space – with hidden lighting above and below. In fact the whole built-in bed will be surrounded by different lighting systems for different moods. Part of the headboard will expand into the side cabinets – which will also have built-in lights. The bed itself will be surrounded by storage boxes (with top lids), underneath it we’ll build two full length drawers to provide even more storage. The opposite wall will have open, floating shelves for everyday use, hanging used clothes etc. The walls and cabinets will be covered with tongue & groove cladding and painted white. The flooring will be white floorboards that continue into the hall and into the second bedroom opposite.

Well, this is the general idea – I know it’s a bit ambitious for a DIY Project, but we shall see. I think we can do it in two weeks. It won’t be easy and we have to make sure that the door on the other bedroom is kept closed to keep out the dust – as this is the space we sleep (still on the floor!).