Before and After – The boy’s room

We decided the kids needed their rooms done next. We thought they deserved to get their rooms finished so they could enjoy them while we work on the rest of the house.

Youngest has the smaller room, but it’s still pretty cool.  He has a porch just outside his room that actually sits on the roof.  His room wasn’t in too bad of shape.  The walls had a thick texture on them as did the ceiling, the floors needed to be refinished, and the porch needs a railing put up, but all in all not too bad.  Here’s a before pic:

Youngest’s bedroom before

Here’s the porch on the roof:

He also had a large closet that was added to the house at some point.  Our best guess was that this room was originally a pretty large bedroom and that the bathroom didn’t exist upstairs at all.  When they put the bathroom in, they cut into this room and added on the closet.  At least, that’s what we think happened.  There are many mysteries in old houses!

The closet, though large, was not very usable and didn’t fit the outside of the house.  Here’s what it looked like from the outside:

Closet “pop out” outside view.

We have been trying to research the house and find some pictures of the house so we can re-do the outside with some historical accuracy.  The best picture I can find so far comes from the County Property Card and it is this big:

Property Card image

Helpful, huh?  After zooming in…a lot…we can see that the “pop out” isn’t there in the photo, so we feel okay about removing the enlarged closet and the pop out.  Yes, I did say that we are actually making a closet smaller.  Crazy-pants, I know.  Here’s what the closet looked like when we bought the house:

Large closet before…

And, here it is after we walled it in:

Big closet made smaller…but still usable!

It’s pretty deep, so we were able to put shelving all the way in the back and still have room for the rod up front.  It looks so nice, now doesn’t it?  Wait till it’s full of Transformers and Legos, and trucks, and action figures, and other boy stuff.

Because we made the closet so much smaller and the room isn’t very big, we had to get creative with storage.  Off to the antique store we went!  We found this cool cabinet, called a “gentleman’s dresser”:

Gentlemen’s Dresser

The best part is the shelving inside:

Inside of dresser

Pretty cool little piece of furniture, huh?  We also found a desk that fits perfectly in the small space between the window and door with storage in the drawers:

Desk and printer’s drawer

Above the desk is an old printer’s drawer that was used to store the letters printers would use when printing presses.  We are using it for Lego minifigures!

Printer drawer made Lego storage!

Since this is a 9 year old’s room, we didn’t want it to be a museum.  We wanted it to fit the age of the home, but we want him to be able to enjoy it, too.  His favorite airplane is an F-22, so we got a Fathead up on the wall for him.  We had a John Elway Fathead that we removed from the other house and tried to put up here (you can kind of see it in the picture of the gentlemen’s dresser), but it didn’t go so well.  We wanted it to be functional with clean lines and a good balance of old and new.  I think it looks pretty cool!

Bedroom before and after