Transforming An Unused Bedroom

Winter is for indoor projects. After cleaning, painting and papering most of the house, there was still one room untouched. The original house plans show an unfinished room over the garage. At some point this room was finished with a connecting door to the nursery, making it ostensibly a bedroom for an au pair. It was a room for which I did not have a use. I have enough bedrooms for guests, we have an office and a game room. What could I possibly do with this last room? I had a brilliant idea to use it as an elegant storage room for porcelain dish sets and other things I had collected. Once I started working on the room, I discovered I had a better use.

Unlike modern houses, with large family rooms and spaces designed for media, the 1934 house plan did not anticipate television. For the first year of my residence, I did not own a television. Andrew and I liked to watch movies and, of course, the Great British Baking Show. I bought a television that lived in a closet and was taken out and balanced on a chair when we wanted to watch. This worked, but it wasn’t always convenient. The purpose of the extra room became clear. We needed to have a room to comfortably watch television!

It is a quirky room; designed as an afterthought and tucked under the eaves, it has two dormers, a surprise bathtub, sink and toilet – all in small space.

The walls of the room are somewhat uneven, there are angles everywhere, inconsistent ceiling heights and a very narrow doorway into the room. The slope of the ceiling gave me an idea – I should make a tent. Don’t we all like tents? As children, my brothers and I would take blankets, and drape them across chairs and tables – held in place by stacks of encyclopedias – to create tents. This was a favorite winter past time. Rooms decorated as tents were extremely fashionable in the French Empire period – an style paying tribute to Napoleon’s campaigns and his elaborate tent. Draping fabric was impractical, so I opted for wallpaper. I found a nice striped wallpaper on ebay and bought a border for an accent.

To simulate a tent, I made a cardboard template to draw and cut a scalloped edge of the tent panels. It was time consuming, but it created a nice effect. The irregularity of the walls presented a challenge for hanging the evenly striped panels. My first attempts at hanging the wallpaper were actually quite funny. Because of the slope of the ceiling, the paper did not want to readily adhere. This reminded me of an old I Love Lucy episode with Lucy and Ethel trying to hang wallpaper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-trvih4Mn0Y After a few tries, I developed a method of balancing the paper in the middle by leaning my head against the ceiling and stretching my arms up and down.

The room had an old wall-to-wall carpet. No doubt it was nice when it was installed, but it was heavily stained and very worn. We looked at carpet at several stores. This was an adventure. We carefully measured each nook and cranny of the room and made a sketch with the measurements. The salesperson at the first store we took it to, looked at us incredulously and said, “what is that? – it’s impossible, we can’t estimate with so many measurements!” The next store we visited had signs on all the racks “Big Carpet Sale, – 20% off” on every rack. We asked about the price listed on the carpet. The salesperson read us the listed price. We asked about the sale. her response was, “what sale? This carpet isn’t on sale!” We pointed to the signs, and she proceeded to take them all down and repeated it is not on sale. The cost was more than I wanted to spend to refurbish the room, so we gave up on the idea of a wall-to-wall carpet. The floor leading into the room was oak, so I took my chances that the floor under the carpet might be salvageable. I was right!

The floor was dirty and stained in places. Sanding a floor, with a machine sander, removes too much of the wood, so I cleaned the floor and lightly sanded it. I then put a sealing coat of shellac. People pay a lot of money for a distressed look to their wood floors; I had the look without any cost. With minimal effort and only two cans of shellac the floor looked good.

Instead of wall-to-wall carpet, I bought an area rug that covered most of the room. I found a dealer on ebay that sells Savafieh carpets at a discount, because they are “damaged.” I bought a wool carpet with an undetectable stain on the back (I tried to find it and couldn’t).

The size of the door opening limited the furniture I could bring into the room. A normal sized couch and chair would never make it through the doorway. The logical solution was to buy floor couches that can double as beds. In case the other guest bedrooms are full, I would have two more beds. I don’t know when I will ever have that many people sleeping over, but I have the capacity.

Last year, I purchased some chairs from the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore. They are solid hardwood and hand carved. The chairs were in the store a long time and were discounted to $1.00 each to get rid of them. I cleaned and upholstered them with a new fabric from my favorite Manhattan fabric store – Mood Fabrics.

The sink and toilet were still eyesores. I covered them up with curtains. What was an unused bedroom is now a completely new media room.

On Sunday, I hosted a dinner part for some friends/neighbors. We had a lovely dinner with champagne cocktails, goat cheese souffles, mushroom risotto, and marjolaine cake for dessert.

After dinner, I gave everyone a tour of the new room. No one laughed, so I believe they approved. Now the next time you visit, we can languish on the new couches and watch a movie – or maybe an episode of the Great British Baking Show – underneath an homage to Napoleon in the tented room. See you soon!