Sunday, January 16, 2011

Making changes to the house

ach weekend, Ian likes to do something productive around the house. He doesn't have much time to work on the house on weekdays so if we don't do things on the weekend, things don't get done.

This weekend, we made some changes in the downstairs bedrooms. The bedroom with the better light is going to be my sewing room and the other one is going to be a workout room with our exercise bike, weights, and yoga mat.

The flooring in the workout room used to be those giant puzzle pieces used in playrooms and we took it out ages ago because we didn't like it. Unfortunately, without a floor covering, that room was very loud and echoey. To fix that problem, we took the carpet out of the sewing room and put it in the exercise room. We'll be putting in a new floor in the sewing room anyways so the carpet would have had to come up sooner or later.

As we were pulling up the carpet in the sewing room, we discovered something interesting: the closet walls were built on top of the carpet. The original floorplans had put the closet on the other side of that wall and I guess at some point they decided to move the closet into the room. For whatever reason, the "professionals" they hired didn't cut the carpet and install the new closet walls against the concrete.

Because that room is getting new flooring and it seems silly to keep closet walls that are sitting on carpet, we'll almost certainly fix up those walls. We may put the close back where it was originally planned or we might actually extend the sewing room to make it super-big. Of course I'd like to do that because it would be easier to fit all my stuff in there and I'd be able to have a crafting and sitting area in there. We need to think about that before we go ahead with plans. It may be that we'll enlarge the room after the sewing room is set up; I don't know.

The carpet didn't fit perfectly in the exercise room but it covered most of the bare concrete, at least, and it definitely helped to reduce the noise there. We had some extra ceiling tiles that were used in the largest basement room and we put those against the wall which further muffled the sound. We're thinking of getting a huge piece of foam, covering it with some nice fabric, and putting it up on the wall as a more permanent noise-reduction plan.

Finally, we put in a new ceiling fixture in the exercise room. The previous owners put a combination light/ceiling fan in each bedroom but that fixture made the exercise room feel really claustrophobic. Even though we put the bike to the side of the room, those fan blades felt really close! We put one of those small half-dome ceiling lights in the room and we're quite pleased with the look.

Putting the light in was a bit of a trial because the two bedrooms were wired strangely. Instead of the lights in each room being wired separately, they were kind of daisy-chained together. The first time the new light was put in, the light switch worked for both rooms. There was an extra wire that somehow was used to separate the light switches in the rooms.

This house is full of surprises! We never know what we're going to uncover whenever we start trying to make changes. That's part of the fun, though, right?

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