With family, farming, and renovation, it’s not hard to feel worn down these days. Spiritually, my gracious Savior has me covered. Physically and mentally, rest is a little harder to come by. I think most people look forward to a clean, quiet, peaceful place to rest after a long day. We have been lacking that since moving. So, Superman and I decided it was time to rectify that…on to the master bedroom!

Because we have already turned the pantry into the master bathroom, we have already done some work to the bedroom. Remember how I said you can’t really work on one room at a time? This is a good example. That once load bearing wall that we could just about push over with our little fingers divided the bathroom from the bedroom. So, we have a nice new wall done already! However, on the bedroom side, that also meant we had to lose a closet. And because that closet ran behind the second closet (think L shape) we were left with a weird gap between the closet and new wall. We decided to take out that closet as well. Who needs a place to hang clothes?

Now we have a nice rectangular room, right? Well, sort of. You know that second front door? Well we uncovered it on the next wall. Suffice it to say, we have some work to do on it. I’m not sure when it was last functional, but it is definitely not energy efficient. Luckily, the rest of the walls were beautiful beech planks, like the rest of the original exterior walls. To keep the house theme cohesive throughout, we set to work cleaning up the planks so we could insulate and chink.

In order to get lath off the walls near the ceiling, we had to remove more of those lovely ceiling tiles you saw in the den. We also got to take the plywood covering off the floor. Neither was disappointing!

I have no idea why anyone would cover up this beautiful plank ceiling with icky tiles, but if they hadn’t I don’t think I would have been brave enough to see what was underneath. While the planks are beautiful and in great shape, we decided to expose the beams and joists in order to tie in with the master bath. Don’t worry, though! We have a plan to use those planks!

After all the planks were removed, we had to remove all the nails that remained in the joists and planks—since we’d be storing them to use later. Then we used nylon brushes to clean up the surfaces a bit. Now we could shift our attention to [finally] seeing if the floors in the bedroom were as good as the original in the den [fingers crossed!].

It definitely needs a good sanding, but yay!

Wishes do come true! We were so happy to see this gorgeous floor underneath. Hopefully we will find time to sand and finish it, but it’s in great shape! The workload, though still large, is shrinking with these awesome finds! And as a bonus, I don’t have to put my designer skills to the test too much, because the wood really allows everything to fit and flow together.

Alas, our work is far from over. We took care of the ceiling and floor so that we could get to every part of the wall. If you saw in the pictures above, the “layers” theme from the bathroom is spilling over into the bedroom. After taking out paneling, we found drywall, plaster, and lath before getting to the studs. But it all had to go. Even though we didn’t change the size of the room, we were happy about getting the work done right. Opening the walls allowed us to remove a lot of old and unused wiring as well as framing in the door correctly. As a bonus, we built it back with 2x4’s and got to salvage some of the old studs to use elsewhere in the house.

One of the places we got to use it in was the very room it came from. It became our window trim! It sounds strange, but after taking off 4 layers of building material, our window frames protruded from the wall quite substantially. We needed to get creative. Besides, no modern painted trim or mdf was going to look right. I told Superman what I wanted and in true hero fashion, he made it happen.

I just adore the shelves above the windows! It adds character and uniqueness that really pull the room together. I would love to repeat it in other rooms, but we don’t have that many studs left (16 on center wasn’t much of a thing back then I’m guessing), and I’m pretty sure Superman would turn me down anyways. It was definitely not the most fun he’s had on a project.

I’d love to show you the finished room, but we are still debating on what we are going to do with it, so you’ll have to wait—and so will I! On to the next room!

No Rest for the weary

Den