Mabey Manor House Tour: Upstairs Bedrooms

Are you ready for the final leg of this house tour (minus the back yard, which is currently covered in snow)? Today I’ll take you upstairs to look at the stairs, two bedrooms, and the upstairs bathroom. If you missed the first parts of the tour you can find them here:

• Introduction
• Entry, Living Room, and Garage
• Kitchen, Laundry Room, and Bathroom
• Family Room and Craft Room

Okay, let’s go upstairs!

As is common in these older houses, the stairs are pretty steep, which doesn’t really bother me. And you have the ever-present brown-painted floor and paneling. The interesting thing about this staircase is that they’ve added a ceiling that makes it look more closed in than it needs to. You can see it better here.

The other interesting thing is that if you go outside, you can see that there’s a window that’s been shuttered up–and covered from the inside with this dropped ceiling. Can you imagine how much more light and spacious this stairway would be with a higher ceiling and natural light? This shot also shows you how steep they are–and with little ones, we’ll be covering the stairs with carpet for safety and installing baby gates at the top and bottom.

At the top of the stairs to the right is the bathroom. Here’s the view when you first look in:

You’re looking at a wall created solely for the purpose of housing the bathtub, and while that may work in a lot of bathrooms, it just doesn’t work in here. Here’s why:

The space between the tub and vanity is TINY. Saige (3) sits on the toilet and kicks the tub. There’s no room to move around in there!

The vanity and toilet are fine, but there’s just not a lot of space in here, even for the kids. And a small bathroom is fine unless you have this going on behind the scenes.

Behind the tub wall is this hallway storage space. It’s 3-ft wide and LONG so if you store something in the back you’re never going to get it out again. It’s just wasted space in my thoughts. Even though we’ve been here for several months it’s only held a couple of items because it’s not practical.

Instead we’re going to knock out the wall with the tub, move it to the far wall (where the toilet currently is) and fill this closet space with lots of built-ins so the storage space is accessible and usable. I understand that they wanted a full-size wall to work with, but the slanted wall will be great for cupboards. The toilet will move to where there’s currently the walkway to get to the closet. And it’s going to be so much more spacious and usable this way.

Another funny thing? There are currently five (yes 5) medicine cabinets in this one bathroom. I think that’s overkill. 🙂

Okay, on to the girls’ room. This room has two windows, and and abundance of light. It’s wonderful!

I love the pitched ceilings up here. They do present some interesting limitations to decorating and arranging, but I wouldn’t trade them. They give everything so much character!

Speaking of limitations, heres an example of what the previous owners did with that awkward space…

Um yeah, they built a long closet over half the window, creating a strange little cubby and cutting out half of the light. We really didn’t understand that one. Another interesting thing they did was to build a complete framework over the plaster walls and ceiling to add paneling and ceiling tiles. They also changed the shape of the walls to have square corners instead of the original (more open) walls. It’s hard to explain, but as we go along in the renovation process you’ll see what I’m talking about.

So we’ll rip out the paneling, fix the flooring (there are some dips that need to be addressed), carpet, and add drywall walls to the plaster (which is not in good enough shape to simply patch) and fix the new ceiling, which will be about 6-8 inches taller without the framework. We’ll move the closet to a slanted wall to get more light in the room, and create window seats under the windows for a fun place to sit and read.

Follow Mabey She Made It’s board Girls’ Room on Pinterest.

Then there’s our bedroom. Much of the same framework and ideas from the girls’ room is the same in here, so I won’t repeat myself. However this room has a couple of interesting features–the first being that it’s HUGE (like 12′ x 24′). There are 3 windows (one each on the north, east, and west sides), which is crazy and fun.

There are several built-ins that we thought would be great, but the drawers are hard to use and not super functional, so they’ll go as well.

The thing is, we’re not “hang out in our room” people so this much space is kind of wasted.

Our solution? Divide it into half and make two rooms. This is a three bedroom house, but where the girls are so young, we’re not comfortable using the downstairs bedroom as a bedroom (lucky me–I get a craft room!) so this solution will work better for our young family. And it will still leave the rooms large enough to be comfortable. We are pretty sure it was previously two rooms anyway.

Follow Mabey She Made It’s board Bedroom ideas on Pinterest.

So what do you think? What would you do? Would you divide the huge room? Talk to me!