Library Renovation

Matt is always looking at houses in our area (and I might also do this at times) dreaming of something better. After online looking at many houses we decided we might as well just stick with what we’ve got an make it the way we want it.

Our house originally had a one car garage that was quickly converted by the first owners into a bedroom to make an in-law suite on one side of the house. In our first big renovation two years ago we finally got rid of the extra kitchen and redid the downstairs bathroom. You can see all of that here. We mostly used the one car garage turned bedroom as a guest room/storage room.

Our book collection was outgrowing the current shelves in the family room and we needed to move some out so that we can get some more seating in there. All six of us don’t fit on the one couch anymore, so it was time to find a way to rearrange the house a bit to make it work better for us. The family room is still a work in progress and I don’t think I have any true before pictures for that, but I’ll post some finished ones once we rearrange and get some new seating.

So in order to do this we decided to take the front half of the guest room and turn into a library that connects to the playroom. The bedroom then became much smaller, but still usable as a guest room. As any project in an older home goes (especially ours as the previous owners were tinker-ers and did most renovations themselves and not very well), it ended up taking longer than planned and was more expensive than planned, but we are so happy with the end result.

So here are some before photos:
The guest room after it was completely emptied:

The playroom wall that came down:

This is the wall that came down:

A few in progress pictures, much to my disappointment they didn’t just bust through the wall like Chip Gaines.

And some after (about 3 months from start to finish):

And finally (since we just had our first visitors), the guest room is ready! Here are a few pictures. It’s very simple and a little on the small side, but we don’t often have many visitors (though anyone is welcome anytime). Feel free to come visit!

What a difference! And now we have pretty much completely redone one side of the house, now on to the other side.