Guest Room Work Begins!

Hello everyone, now that the Christmas festivities are over we are starting to do work on the interior of our home.  In 2014 we finally moved ahead with a major addition to our 1850's stone farmhouse with the contractor finishing his work last spring.  Unfortunately the work took several months longer than anticipated so we didnt have last winter to finish the interior as we had planned.  Now we are back on track, one year later!

We hired a contractor that was experienced with old stone structures.  As we are both fairly handy people we had the contractor handle all of the major construction and thought we would do the final finishing ourselves.  We are optimistically hoping to have everything done by the end of 2016 and I will be providing frequent updates.

The first project is the upstairs guest bedroom.  Our plans called for a cathedral window to mimic another cathedral window that is part of the original old house.  We were also very specific that we wanted to carry the sloped ceilings from the old house into the new construction.  Our goal was to have the addition look like it has always been here.  All of the windows were specially ordered to have the same appearance as the windows in the old house.

We made very few alterations to the original design.  One of the changes we made was to eliminate a walk-in closet from the guest room.  As the room is not very big I thought that the closet would take too much space but after looking at the room for several months I thought we should have some sort of closet after all.  So we came up with a compromise and are building a small closet so that guests will have somewhere to hang their clothes.  The interior of the closet will be lined in cedar.  A custom door will have a slanted top which I think adds character and is in keeping with the style of the room.  The little area next to the closet with have a couple of shelves and a lamp.

The opposite side of the room shows some of the detail of the sloped ceilings.  When the construction was being done some of the workers were joking about the amount of swearing going on while I was away...all of the slopes and angles made for some very challenging construction.  

This room is immediately above our new dining room on the main floor.  Both rooms incorporated the existing stone wall from the old house.  We are so happy that keeping the stonework exposed was a major part of the construction.  As in the past I have selected heritage paint colours, this is a Benjamin Moore colour called Buxton Blue.  

While having dinner at a friend's home we were admiring the transoms that she had built over the doors in her new home and thought we would like to do the same.  As the doorways had already been framed and drywalled the contractor had to undo some of his work.  The framed area above the doorway will eventually hold a stained glass window.  I am thinking that the shop that sold the Tiffany lamp I recently purchased may be able to help with this as the owner does stained glass work.

 We spent a lot of time considering flooring options.  As we live on a farm and have lots of pets we needed something that was very durable.  Although we love the look of wood flooring our experience with our existing wood floors is that they cannot stand up to 4 large dogs, 3 cats and the general dust and grit that gets tracked through a farmhouse.  We finally settled on this high quality laminate floor from Mannington.  It was easy to install although it was quite fussy to cut and notch the end boards to incorporate the changing shape of the stone wall.

Have a great week and thank you for visiting!