One Room Challenge {Week Three} – Moving Walls and Doorways

Welcome back to my closet renovation!  A couple of weeks ago I shared that I will be participating in the One Room Challenge hosted by Calling it Home (once again!). The challenge is to completely redesign any space in your home in only 5 short weeks, and then to share the big reveal on week 6. As we know from our daughter’s Big Girl Bedroom and  our Guest Bedroom transformations, it is definitely a challenge!  We are now two weeks into moving walls and doorways – no turning back now! It’s been a LOT more work than we expected, but I can’t wait to show you our progress.

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Week 1 / Week 2 / You’re here / Week 4 / Week 5 / Week 6

Just as a reminder, this is our design plan for my dream closet.  Last week we started the project and I didn’t realize just how much work it was going to be. It’s a LOT of work! lol.

If you are wanting to move walls and/or doorways yourself, there are a lot of things to consider – and almost every. single. one. of these things affected our transformation.

First have check if your wall is structural to see if you can safely change the framing. If you’re not sure a Structural Engineer can be contracted for a consultation, and they will let you know.

Once you know you can move the wall there are some things you will need to think about inside the walls. Primarily: plumbing, HVAC, and electrical. For our simple reno, we had to move all three!

Electrical means everything from lights, switches, outlets, and even lone thermostats, lol. See ours above? We have to move it so that our new sliding door would slide.

We had to put a hole in the ground to move our HVAC and plumbing lines.

Above ^^ you can see the hole filled with new lines! White pipe = plumbing. Shiny silver = HVAC. Then we had to plug up both holes again.

 

Moving all those lines is definitely do-able for a DIYEr, but is all requires more money and more planning.

If you are moving the wall, like we did, you also need to think about where the new wall is going. Does it block or interfere with anything on the floor or ceiling: lighting, attic entries, floor vents, etc.

The above picture shows our attic entry. Because we are closing off that hallway, and putting a large ikea wardrobe directly underneath there, we have to move the attic entry too – ugh. Same goes for the floor vent. It was about to be covered up with a giant, heavy wardrobe, and it had to move forward (in HVAC pics above).

The picture above shows our newly framed attic entry.

Finally if you are adding a new swinging door, you need to think about where the door will swing open. Will there be anything in the way when it’s open?

Lucky for me! I have this GORGEOUS sliding barn door. It’s available in the US and will be available in Canada soooo soon. (for now my Canadian friends can contact [email protected]).

After all of the crazy hard work that went into this week, I needed something beautiful to make me feel better. This barn door will do the trick (click here in Canada)! I just installed it to look at it, but it still needs to come off and get stained. Plenty more details on the easiest-barn-door-installation-ever coming soon!

Finally, to show off our new framing…

I really should’ve drawn little arrows so you could see what I’m looking at, but the part of the ceiling above ^^ without drywall, is the new top of the shower (*not to be completed during this challenge…*). You can see that our hallway is GONE! For pictures of the changes and plans stop in on this post.

Oh, and we’ve started drywalling :) How productive was your week?

Here’s how we are doing on our lengthy Master Bedroom Closet To-Do List:

• Clean out closet (FULL purge!)
• Complete demo
• Reframe closet (& shower!)
• Cut/build new door frame for barn door
• Move electrical, vents, and water
• A BILLION OTHER THINGS THAT WE DIDN’T PLAN ON
• Drywall up
• Scrape popcorn ceiling
• Paint walls and ceiling
• Trim closet and doorways
• Install sliding barn door
• Stain sliding barn door
• Install new tile flooring
• Install Weathered Wood Ceiling Panels
• Install new wardrobes
• Buy a new rug
• Build DIY closet lighting
• DIY a closet mirror
• DIY Drawer Pulls
• Buy closet accessories

EEK! We have a LOT of work to do in a few short weeks! Wish us luck!

See more of my One Room Challenge Here:

Click HERE to see more great One Room Challenge Participants!