Master Bedroom Progress

Drywall going up over new windows & insulation in our garden level master bedroom. (Week 7 of our renovation.)

Our master bedroom suite is on the garden level of the brownstone, so it is one floor down from our main living space on the parlor floor.  When we bought the apartment, the garden level was a large recroom with a miniature and nightmarish bathroom that was “renovated” by the previous owner’s brother.  The mudroom (that you can barely see in the far left of this image) opens out to our garden.  Despite the slightly dungeon-like nature of the space, we immediately saw the possibility of making the downstairs a private master bedroom suite.   We felt that this large, north-facing space had a lot of unrealized potential.

First and foremost, we knew we’d be swapping out the steel spiral staircase for a standard wooden L-shaped stair.  While the new staircase has a larger footprint, we gained great closet space underneath it.  We moved and enlarged the bathroom, had all of the exposed pipes removed or moved behind walls, raised the dropped ceiling by about a foot and moved the wall on the right hand side back, also by about a foot.  Electric baseboard heating and recessed lighting have been added.  We also invested in new vinyl windows that are not fancy, but hey, they open and close, which is a big improvement over the old ones.  We left the terrazzo tile and will be covering it again with our budget-friendly sisal carpet squares from Ikea.  Here are some pictures of the rec room BEFORE renovation.  I hope to be posting AFTER pix in the coming weeks!

Garden level BEFORE renovation. Notice the many exposed pipes which are gone in the post-demo picture at top. Photo: ©Moya Mc Allister

Garden level BEFORE renovation. We've installed a new L shaped wooden staircase that empties into a hallway in what was a sleeping nook. A large bathroom now exists in the closet area on the right side. Photo: ©Moya Mc Allister

Exposed boiler pipes BEFORE renovation. These are now gone! Photo: ©Moya Mc Allister

Note that we super-sized the absurdly small bathroom. We wanted to incorporate a supporting column into the new wall because we didn't have the budget to move it.