Last time I showed you the front bedroom, in this two bedroom “Little Brick Cottage”. Now I’m going to show you how we transformed the back bedroom.
When we first bought this antique Victorian brick house, so quaint and sorta small it quickly got the name ‘the little brick cottage’. At that time the back bedroom looked like this: (almost as startling as Large Marge was in PeeWee’s Big Adventure, remember? “…and she looked like this…!”)
There she is, in all her ‘before’ glory! Orange walls, narrow 1970’s trim, dirty berber carpet, old windows that have cracked panes of glass and don’t open, paneled walls with a horizontal seam 8” from the floor all the way around the room, and a bright orange radiator to boot.
One of the first things we had to do was cut the doorway to the closet larger, so the closet space could be used more efficiently. We also had to cut out the wall between the bathroom and back of the closet for re-plumbing etc. the bathroom, but I’ll get into that later. Point is, we did ‘steal’ some space from this closet, for the bathroom, but it was necessary.
Under the berber carpet we found Douglas Fir floors that needed to have that tar stuff sanded off it, then stained and finished.
This shows the fir flooring after it was re-finished. But see the floor in the closet? It’s actually laminate. We didn’t have any original floor in this little space, so I picked up one box of laminate from Menard’s and it’ll work great for this little space.
Here you can see the new trim installed and primed. (Don’t be afraid to bring that trim paint up onto the walls to give yourself some painting grace.)
This show the new windows, that actually work! And the new trim. I was just getting ready to patch all the holes in the paneling before I painted the walls. I like the paneling, the grooves in the wallboard has character, but the color needs to be changed!
This is the finished closet now. We have an access panel in the back wall for the washer and dryer hookups that are in the bathroom now, (I’ll give you the details about that when I write about the bathroom) .
I painted the closet fresh white and we installed this simple organizer, to try to get as much use of the space that we could.
To cover the horizontal seam around the room on the bottom 8” of the paneling, (due to the walls being over 8’ high) we put in extra wide base trim that just covers the seam. It totally looks original, as the antique trim in the other parts of the house is this high or higher.
I also painted the radiator white in here.
The gray I painted on the walls is the same gray that is the inside of the built-ins in the dining room. Carrying the color theme throughout the small house is important, plus allowing a neutral color for the new family to decorate how they like. I used Hirshfield’s Heavy Duty in a semi-gloss for the wood paneling, as well as all the trim.
This back bedroom didn’t have a door when we started, so we put in the same 6 panel style as in the front bedroom, and used simple farmhouse style oil rubbed bronze doorknobs to go with the farmhouse style trim.
So here is the 2nd bedroom done! It was transformed from a ‘jarring’ orange room lacking personality, to a lovely room with farmhouse style character.
I still have a few more rooms to show you from the cottage: kitchen, bathroom and back entry… some of my favorites, and for sure the rooms with the biggest changes!
Here are more posts featuring the little brick cottage renovation projects:
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