2 Amazing Bedroom Makeovers - Mold, Fire Damage and More

This house, Fixer #2, was a 2 bedroom disaster when we bought it. Two amazing bedroom makeovers later and we ended up with three bedrooms! (The Master bedroom got it’s own post).

If you recall from the Kitchen & Dining post, when we first walked into the house we noticed it had a funky smell about it.

These rooms had their OWN funky smells.

Bedroom #1 had:

A TERRIBLE smell to it (yet different than the dining area)
A built in area that was non-functional and wasting tons of the already limited space
One ratty old window to the outside
A window INTO Bedroom #2 (which was an enclosed ‘porch’ at the time)
Sloped drop ceiling which took inches from an already short room

When we first moved in, this is the room we slept in.

I never felt well waking up every morning and we knew there had to be something off in the room.

Thankfully, this was the next project after we finished the kitchen/dining. (See it peeking through the door?)

That door went away. The room behind the wall with the black dresser became a hallway and we made the door open to the hall, instead of the dining room.

This was that weird, waste of space, possibly makeshift closet area. Removing it made a huge difference in the size of the room.

The window on the right is looking into Bedroom #2 (a dirty old enclosed porch at the time).

Renovation Realities

And there’s the funky smell.

And health problems.

Black Mold.

I was SO happy when we found this because it was finally clear what was going on.

I was horrified at the same time. We SLEPT IN THERE for months! Notice how the mold is all around the heat duct AND the window sill above it? It had to be blowing spores right into the room every time the heat came on. UGH.

Ryan and a friend cut the wall out and removed the entire subfloor.

They threw it into a dumpster out the window so they didn’t trek it through the house. Then they treated the remaining, clean parts of the wall to be sure everything was covered.

Afterwards I used an ozone generator in the room and put plants on the floor to help clean the air.

Our best guess was there was a fire in years past and water damage from putting it out. Someone covered it all up with paint, trim and carpet, leaving black mold to grow unchecked.

That left us with that toxic mess, who knows how many years later.

This room did not have a closet. To be considered a bedroom it needed to have a closet, so Ryan framed one in after the drywall and paint was complete.

With the mold remediated, new subfloor down and painting done, it was time for carpet!

Then came a new, slider window.

Amazing Bedroom Makeovers – Bedroom #1

Bedroom #2 had:

A cement floor
Spiders everywhere
Scuzzy old carpet on part of the floor
A door to the outside
Tiny, low windows
A completely unsecured wall (if you pushed hard enough you could rip it away from the house)

When Ryan tore into the stairs going down into this room he found junk underneath Bedroom #1 (above).

This lamp was one of the things. Who knows how many years it was under there, yet it still turned on and all the bulbs (see the little ones in the base?) lit up too. Craziness.

Ryan and our friend tore out all the walls so they could insulate, take out the door, do wiring, tear out and replace windows, and start building up the floor.

These are still the old, nasty windows, but building the floors up went great, making for only two total steps down into the room from the rest of the house.

Below is once they put the new ceiling light in (there were no lights in the room previously), closed off an old window and put one of the new ones in.

Foam board insulation in the ceiling. The previous (crappy) workmanship meant that standard insulation wouldn’t fit between the rafters.

Considering snow doesn’t melt off of the roof above anymore, it works really well too.

Ryan spent a solid two weeks on this after our second sweet baby (Baby Girl) was born.

He took the only vacation time he had from work so we could get the bedroom finished for our first born who was still sleeping in a toddler bed in our room (Bedroom #1).

It was TIGHT for those couple weeks, but he was amazing, and we had an amazing friend who helped a ton, and they got it all done in that time!