Ten years – My Extra Room from Office to Guest Bedroom to Den

Our extra room. We’re getting to the point now where calling this our guest bedroom isn’t exactly accurate anymore and will be entirely inaccurate once we move forward with our future plans. This room didn’t exist when I started the renovation ten years ago. It was the last portion left of the screened in porch that was wrapped around two sides of this home in 1925. Over the years my grandparents enclosed one portion after another. They created an entryway, an interior stairwell and then a main floor bedroom for them as everybody got older. It killed me to lose the screened in porch. Everything about it was ideal. It was South facing and wonderfully big… Except that it was only twenty feet from a stupidly busy dirt road.

I came out here all the time when I was a kid but even then I was entirely aware of how every inch of it was covered in a skin of filth. I’m sure it was a lovely place to hang out back in 1925 when there was no traffic and all of three neighbors within five miles…

But if I had kept this porch I would not have used it much at all and would have constantly been cleaning it.

It just made more sense to get a second extra room on the main floor not to mention a privacy hall to get the other bedroom’s door out of the living room.

The hall gave the main floor bathroom privacy too. At the time I created the hall shaped like a big T with the back door at one end of it and a giant closet for maximum storage.

Since then we enclosed the closet and part of the hall to create a bonus room for Lodi.

I built this room entirely thinking it would always be an office. (It actually was my office for a few months as you can see in the pictures.) It shares a wall with the living room that is almost entirely taken up by a glass window. Its smaller than our other main floor bedroom and it also has a much smaller closet too.

The lack of privacy with the living room alone made the other room a far more desirable bedroom.

But what I wanted was an interior workshop for tools.

Now, I know normal people would not have a tool shed on their bucket list taking over their nicest main floor bedroom…

I’m not most people lol.

If you own a house than it needs to work for you first no matter how “odd” it may be to other folks. They’re not paying for it. They don’t live there. They don’t get an opinion.

Because the tools weren’t going anywhere we went ahead and moved the backdoor / doggie door into the big bedroom suddenly making it the less ideal guest bedroom anyway.

So I made this extra room into a sweet little guest bedroom years ago when I decided to convert the other room into a workshop and then we did a remodel of this room not long after I met Lodi.

We painted it out in a dark blue, rearranged the furniture and added privacy curtains to the big window between it and the living room.

(We did discuss covering up the window with sheetrock, just leaving the stained glass above it but the fact of the matter remains we don’t have guests very often and the light coming in through this room into the living room is a very fine thing.)

Since then not much has changed in this room but the people who have actually used the bed over the last few years have almost entirely been Lodi and I.

With our conflicting schedules it hasn’t been a strange thing for one of us to sleep here so as not to wake the other one. Not to mention insomnia or sickness has had one of us crashing here from time to time too.

Our extra room

Our extra room

But we don’t use it enough to justify a room being devoted to it – our sofa is quite comfy and I have a little bed / futon in my office now too.

What this room is used for almost exclusively now is basically Lodi’s own office and den.

But this room wasn’t designed for that and that really bothers me.

In fact it basically drives me nuts to have so much stuff in a space that we hardly use or doesn’t work well for us at all.

The bed is literally in Lodi’s way!

Fortunately though we don’t have to lose a guest sleeping space to convert this room into a den! (We happen to have an almost entirely unused basement living space that I’ve been side eyeing for years…)

But all of this is going to require some serious furniture rearranging and purging!

We still want a place for guests to sleep so one of the sofas from our basement has to go to accommodate a bed down there and it just so happens one of them will fit perfectly right here.

There is also a coffee table in the basement that will fit up here too.

First though I will have to part with my old desk, end table and bed but I’m actually ok with that. The end table came from Target about thirty years ago (I think), the old steel bed frame was upstairs when I bought this place and the desk my grandparents built some decades ago.

They turned out pretty cute when I repainted them all into a set and I think I may have a niece or two who might like them. Otherwise, even if they go to our salvage depot, that’s ok with me too.

(Even I know I have to get rid of things sometimes…)

The lack of wall space in this room leaves no other decent place for a TV so it will remain in the closet on the dresser that’s already in there.

Everything else we’ll be pulling out for Lodi to decide what he wants on the walls. (The shelves are cool but they may or may not be staying etc.) I don’t know yet his thoughts on bringing up his guitars and music equipment from the basement but I think he would find that he would really like his music room up here too actually.

We’re both still happy with the color of the room but the rug on the floor is getting the boot. We’ll be opting for a lower nap and much bigger rug that will basically “carpet” the entire room.

I’m really excited!

Our extra room