Rejuvenation Projects Blog

We got the keys to our house in November of 2009. It was a bit of a mad dash to prep it for our December move-in. We had to get it all releveled, rewired, and painted top-to-bottom. On top of that, we ambitiously bit off a kitchen renovation and had eyes on our home office.

The room we selected for a home office is on the ground floor of the house – in front of our kitchen, beside the living room area. With this in mind, we really wanted it to be a working room (as my husband works from home) that could be used by anyone and everyone.

Here is what it looked like in its original state – the previous owners ripped out the old carpet and left it soft blue (with rose pink closet interiors). This had originally been the master bedroom – but all doors had been removed…standing directly in front of the window to the front lawn (the right window in my first post), this is a view of the closet wall. You can see the (renovated in the 60s) kitchen through the door.  Click on any photo to see a larger picture.

This is the room from the opposite perspective. The window is nice and large – and notice the ceiling fan/light fixture combo that came with the house. There were ceiling fans everywhere (and where there wasn’t ceiling fans, there was tacky fluorescents).

As we had decided to renovate both the office and the kitchen, we decided to demo the wall with the closets to gain some valuable floor space in the kitchen. It’s amazing just how much debris can come out of a single wall demo – we did all the demo ourselves with the help of some friends – demoing is very therapeutic, I have to admit. Rebuilding, on the other hand…

With the wall gone, we considered for a brief moment going open concept – but an office/kitchen area wasn’t really ideal for our needs.

It made it look so much bigger though!  You can also see that the fan is gone, replaced with a temporary solution.  What lighting fixture do you think would work in this kind of space?  I’m partial to the Pembrook but am open to suggestions!  With the wall gone, my hub started to frame out the space and come up with a way to repair the holes left in the ceiling.  This was much harder than in looks – our walls are all double gyprocked and have a layer of plaster on them (horse hair?).  Every wall has its own depth – hence the interesting ceiling framing that you can see in this picture.

This is the wall my hub built – his first wall in a very long time, it was a little crooked. This is where we started to learn in the reno process that we aren’t as handy as we thought we were…that said, it turned out well enough. The door opens and shuts, we managed to hide any great differences with selective use of molding. And with that – I offer the final wall, finished and painted.  The only thing that gives it away is the ceiling plaster job.

We managed to salvage enough original molding from the closets to frame out the new door. I stripped all of the moldings and repainted them (this was harder than doing furniture, it surprised me).  The door offers a view into our evolving kitchen reno – you can also see things like the ceiling patch job, some remaining wall repairs (from having the house rewired), and the original closet footprint on the floor.  Our plan is to have a built-in that will hide all of this, bringing it all together and hopefully maximizing the space we have for books.  Recently, we managed to finally hire a woodworker to do up a set of built-ins for this wall. I can’t wait to show you the work-in-progress!