220 Cochrane: Two Rooms Finished!

We've spent a great deal of time working outside of the house and getting the downstairs washroom finished, but we found that there were times that we were waiting for things to dry or there was only room for one person in the bathroom so we started the master bedroom closet. This was also prompted by the inconvenience of living out of a combination of a closet in another bedroom and laundry baskets!

We started things by mudding the holes in the walls (I am not sure what they used this room for, but I pulled about 16 nails from the wall). We also repaired the three holes the electricians made while updating the electrical. From there Aaron primed the room and painted the first coat of paint. The colour we chose for the room was Snappy Dresser by Para which we had mixed in a Benjamin Moore paint to save some money. This room was lacking the large baseboards that were found in the rest of the house so we decided to follow the template we used in the downstairs bathroom and add eight inch pine boards with moulding. I have to say they turned out amazing!! From there Aaron finished off the painting.

One of the most difficult parts of this renovation has definitely been the layout. Although it is a large room we wanted a lot of furniture in it. We spent the last couple weeks changing the room around and trying out furniture in different locations and sequences to find one that gave us the functionality and aesthetics we were looking for.

We painted all the doors black as we loved the finish when we did it in our old house. As Aaron has posted before it's some of the smaller details that make a room great, but they are the most time consuming. We spent more time then either of us planned trying to perfect the door knobs with crystal ones that matched the other doors in the house. After spray painting them black and cutting the rods and a few trips to the hardware store for small parts, I think we finally achieved the look we were going for.

We were very lucky that we were able to use most of our existing furniture in this space, like the dressers. In the old house we had Ikea bookshelves for our sweaters. They worked, but we always found it difficult to keep the things tidy looking. After looking our furniture over we decided to use a shelf we had with cubbies in it. When we put in place it wasn't high enough so we went to Target and found one that added the perfect height to the shelf (and was on sale). We drilled a couple of holes in the bottom and added some dowels for support and a bracket to hold it together for the perfect centre shelf. From there we added three hanging bars for our clothes, giving us far more hanging than our previous closet.

We added a little art above the dressers. Who can say they have art, a window, a skylight and a balcony in their closet!!

Looking at our laundry hamper and laundry baskets we felt we needed something more functional for our dirty clothes. Finding I was already missing our large front load washing machine from the old house, we needed something that would show it was time to put a load in. We went to a few stores and found the perfect laundry hamper / laundry basket at Walmart. We bought three so we can sort our laundry and know when there is a load ready to go in.

The room originally had a very ugly track style light in it. While the electrician was here we had him change this to two sconces on either side of the French doors, giving us much needed extra lighting.

The last touch we added was a belt and tie holder. I think these were the perfect finish for the closet, allowing us to see all the items we own. For the belt holder we cut a four inch board, sprayed it black and added several hooks to hang the belts from. For the ties, again we cut a four inch board and sprayed it black then hammered nails into it so we could see all the ties we owned.