Jeff Roberts:
You don’t have to go buy a big fancy house. You can repurpose space in a house to get what you want. You just have to be able to imagine it. So I’m going to show you quickly here how we repurposed a useless room. I think it was an office. I’m not really sure. It was more of a storage room. But a useless room, into what the homeowner wanted, which was a first floor bedroom and bathroom.
So we’ll walk through here. I’m going to start on the other side of the room. This room had no windows and a bedroom has to have windows for egress. That’s the code. So the first thing we had to do was we had to put a window. A window has to be a certain size and it just has to meet egress. So we added a window to the room.
I’ll explain why later, but this used to be a closet. There was a closet door right here, and we got rid of the closet, and we got rid of the closet door. In its place behind you, we built this wall of cabinetry, and this wall of cabinetry isn’t what it seems. It’s actually, the purpose of this cabinetry is to take the place of furniture because it’s a small room. There’s not a lot of space in here for dressers and chest of drawers and typical furniture that you’d have in a bedroom. So it takes the place of furniture, but it also takes the place of the closet that we got rid of. And that was a pretty big closet. That closet was about six foot by ten foot walk-in. But everything that would fit in there neatly and organized fits in this closet. There’s sections for hanging clothes, there’s sections with shelves, for that type stuff. There’s drawers that you might use in a dresser or a chest. But anyway, this is the closet and the furniture all in one.
I am going to take you in and show you the… I mentioned that we needed a full bathroom downstairs, and I’m going to show you how we got a full bathroom downstairs. So first of all, the door that you’re looking through right now to see into that tub, this door was not here. So we installed this door to get from the bedroom into the new bathroom. As you come in, where you see this tub, this was where the washer and dryer used to be. The washer and dryer have moved to another location now, but this is where the washer and dryer were. They had folding doors that you would close in front of them.
Going this way, there used to be a wall where I’m standing, you see this partial wall. This was a full wall with a door. And as you go through this door, there was a toilet and there was a cabinet, a sink cabinet, a vanity cabinet, where you could wash your hands. This was a half bath. Powder bath, some people call it. So there was a laundry room. There was a half bath.
As you go down further past the toilet, there used to be a wall right here. This wall behind me was the closet that I pointed out earlier that we got rid of, and we turned it into a big walk-in shower instead of a big walk-in closet. It has rain shower, handheld, main valve, diverter valve, a bench, really, really nice, big shower. So you can see, just if you can imagine trying to take something that really isn’t useful space and cramped and whatever, you don’t have to go buy a big fancy house. You can repurpose space in a house to get what you want. You just have to be able to imagine it.
And I think that we did a really good job with the homeowner’s help and ideas of re-imagining this space into what they wanted, which was a downstairs bedroom and full bathroom.
