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When we were looking at the house, we knew right away that we would need to do two renovation projects. One of those projects is to redo the horribly ugly kitchen, but that project is a bit off in the future. The other was slightly changing the floor plan on the 2nd floor.

There are three bedrooms on the 2nd floor, but when we bought the house, there were only doorways to two of those bedrooms from the hallway. In other words, one bedroom had its own entrance but two bedrooms were attached so you had to go through one room to get to the other like a railroad-style apartment. While the house was sold to us as a three-bedroom since each bedroom had its own closet, we knew we would need to change the layout a bit to increase the value of our home. We decided to make this our first renovation project since it would be the least costly of all the major projects we’d like to do in the house and it would allow us to fully move into the upstairs once it was done. The project came in at budget and took six business days.

Here’s what the construction crew did during the renovation:

• The crew closed the doorway between the room we use as the office and our master bedroom, added baseboards to the new walls and replaced oak flooring in both rooms.
• The crew took out the closet that had been in the master bedroom and replaced that area with a door to the hallway.
• In order to accommodate the new doorway from the master bedroom to the hallway, the crew had to push back the doorway to the third bedroom, what we are currently using for storage. This technically makes the third bedroom smaller, but because of the way it is designed, the main space in the third bedroom is the same size and the only thing that is smaller is the entryway to that bedroom. The crew also replaced baseboard and flooring in that room.
• We plan to create a large closet in the master bedroom. The attic door was large and took up a lot of ceiling space that we need to add track doors for this closet, so the crew resized the attic door so it is smaller and will fit in what will eventually be our closet.
• Lastly, the crew replaced drywall, oak flooring and baseboard in the hallway.

Now we have three separate bedrooms upstairs and it all looks great. The work is far from done, however. In addition to the DIY project we have coming of building a master bedroom closet, we asked the crew not to paint any of the rooms and hallway because we wanted to do it all ourselves. And since we don’t have a closet in the master bedroom, we are still using the closets in the other rooms to store our clothing. Even though there is still work to be done, we are many steps closer to being able to fully unpack and move into the upstairs, which we are very much looking forward to.