I know some of you are probably wondering why I haven’t start installing the flooring in the bedroom yet. I promise that this isn’t one of those situations where I’m just procrastinating. The issue is that I have to get all of my plans in place before I can start on the floor. I’ve been thinking through and contemplating several different ideas, and depending on which idea I run with, it could affect the floor installation.
As I shared on Monday, I’ve been contemplating the idea of removing the idea of removing the door that leads to the bedroom and widening that doorway. The door I’m talking about is the one to the left of the table and lamp.
Right now, that’s only a 32-inch door. That’s not ideal for a person who uses a wheelchair. So I had the idea to remove the door altogether and widen that doorway as much as possible.
If I widen the doorway as much as possible, but keep it as a cased opening, I would gain five inches of width for that doorway. Here’s a look at that door from the other side so you can see how tight the fit is. But five inches is a pretty substantial gain. For a wheelchair user, every added inch is beneficial.
So if I remove that door, that means that I would put French doors in the current cased opening between the music room and the hallway. Of course, I would use frosted glass for privacy, but this gives us an idea of what that would look like…
For the time being, it might be a little confusing because the guest bathroom would only be accessible from the hallway, which means going through the new French doors to access the bathroom. But we’ve been living with a confusing interim floor plan for four years now, so we’re no strangers to confusing floor plans. 😀 If I had a quarter for every time someone over the last four years has asked, “Kristi, where’s your master bedroom?” when I post a floor plan, I’d be a very wealthy woman. Or, you know, I’d have at least $20. 😀
So while it would be a little confusing for now, once we build the new, smaller addition, that wall with the bathroom door would be closed up, and the bathroom would be accessible from the other side of the bathroom. That means that everything beyond those new French doors would be the master suite.
Okay, but I’ve already gone over all of that in a previous post. That was all just for review, and to say that I’ve decided that I definitely DO want to go forward with this plan. I discussed it with Matt, and he’s fully on board with it and loves the idea, too.
So then that brings me to the next idea I had. Since everything beyond the French doors will (eventually) be the master suite, and the hallway will kind of be a little anteroom to the bedroom, I had the thought that maybe I shouldn’t just remove the door and widen the cased opening to the bedroom. Maybe I should remove the opening altogether and make the walls and ceiling smooth and uninterrupted. In other words, there would be nothing left there to indicate that there was a doorway or cased opening at all. The ceiling would be continuous, flat, and smooth. The walls would be continuous, flat, and smooth. If I did that, we would gain TWELVE inches of width into the room. Now THAT’S a significant amount of width for Matt to maneuver through! Twelve whole inches!
So you can see now how this decision will affect the flooring, and why I haven’t just jumped right in with both feet on installing the floor yet. I have to get these details worked out before I can start. My contractor is coming over tomorrow to look at it and see if that narrow wall is load-bearing, and if it is what can be done about it. I don’t think it is, but he seems to think it is. But it’s so narrow in the whole scope of things, and it’s already almost all doorway, so I think we can find a solution.
That idea does pose a bit of a challenge, though. If there’s not a doorway or cased opening there at all, that means that there’s no definitive end to the bedroom and beginning to the hallway. And that means that there’s no good stopping point for the wall treatment in the bedroom, i.e., the wainscoting on the bottom and the grasscloth on top. So if I go that direction, I’m thinking that I’ll just need to carry the wainscoting and grasscloth through to the hallway as well, and treat both areas as one room. It’ll be a uniquely shaped room, but it’ll be all one room nonetheless.
I’ve also decided that I am 100% going to remove the cabinet in the hallway. I’ve been contemplating it for a while, especially since I finalized my plans for the closet and laundry area. Not only will I no longer need this storage cabinet (which has served us very well while we’ve had it, so it wasn’t a waste of money or time at all), but it does kind of create an unnecessary obstacle for Matt getting through this area.
Plus, it visually closes in the area. When this area was going to be home gym and guest bedroom, but cabinet was fine. Matt’s been working around it for four years now, and we always looked forward to the day that we had a bedroom that was accessible through a different hallway. But now that this is going to be the master suite, I think it needs to go to make things easier for him.
But that brings up another issue. Do you know what’s NOT under that cabinet? The new subfloor and flooring that was installed after our hallway flooded and I had the subfloor and flooring replaced. They had to cut around the cabinet to replace everything. You can see the corner of the cabinet in the photo below and how they had to cut around it.
So that’s yet another challenge that I’ll have to deal with, and yet another reason that I haven’t yet jumped in with both feet to start installing the flooring. These plans take time, and I don’t want to miss any details before I get started.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
